The powerful online advertising industry must be protected basically at all costs – that is the message arriving from Germany, where Vodafone is testing a new system that will track users at ISP level in order to deliver targeted ads.
The writing’s been on the wall for a while that all sorts of nefariousness for user privacy, safety and freedom practices – like tracking and censorship – have been slowly moving towards “contaminating” deeper levels of internet’s architecture, rather than simply web platforms and services.
What Vodafone is doing in Germany is attempting to help advertisers continue to track and target users despite what they might be doing to protect themselves against this by blocking cookies, masking IP addresses, or using various browser settings and extensions.
All of that is rendered useless if the very internet service provider (ISP) inserts its tracker at the very first step of accessing the internet. Many privacy and security experts have been warning for a while now that it is not social media giants like Facebook and Google who actually have the most personal data on users, but their ISPs....
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