As long as they stick to this policy, I will appreciate it given their history of not showing compassion for individual customers.
Update: it does specifically mention aggregate data.
Before I blocked ads, ads would follow me around. The information to do that was collected, and possibly sold, probably not by my ISP. It wasn't "my browser history," but it was as a result of my browsing activity.
This news has thrown around "your browsing history," which is at once sensationalist (because, as you point out, no one is selling that) and obfuscating, because someone is collecting and selling data that comes from browsing activity.
Right now your "data persona" is mostly obfuscated by market fragmentation and the fact that advertisers wouldn't know what to do with all of the data if they had it. As someone on the "inside", the AI push scares me because it will make actually reconciling all of the disparate data sources both feasible and profitable.
It is entirely a by-product of the fact that ad slots are auctioned off while a page loads, and when someone wins that auction, they can run JavaScript in your browser.
So if they cookie you on their website, then they get to run JavaScript from winning an ad auction on a different site, they can still see their cookies and know it is "you".
Not trying to downplay any privacy implications here, but ad networks and sites where ads are placed don't actually need any of your browsing history to make this work.
(I simplified this somewhat by ignoring the relationship between the actual advertisers and retargeting providers, but that is just more of an economies of scale/arbitrage thing.)
They aren't using your web history specifically, because it's actually pretty hard to do a good job inferring things about you in the few milliseconds you have to make a bid. Instead, there are multi-billion dollar companies including Google and Facebook who do the intetpreting for you and sort of offer a taxonomy of audience groups for you to choose from.
So the cookie check at bid time is usually asking one of these middlemen data processing companies for their read on you, which is derived from your browsing history or your Facebook post contents or even what you write in Gmail.
Only thing I'd add is that there are many heuristics for deciding how valuable you are as a pair of eyes. Retargeting is about getting an ad to follow you around the internet. But there's also geographical and demographic targeting, which depends on the advertiser having a hypothesis about which target audience is worth engaging.
That said, here are a few terms to search as a starting point:
* Ad exchange
* Real time bidding
* Search retargeting
* Data management platform
* Demand side platform
Here are some product names:
* Doubleclick Bid Manager
* Google tag manager
* Google AdX
* Adobe Media Optimizer
And some companies to look up:
* AppNexus
* Bluekai
* Excelate
* Celtra
Finally, I'd set up your own AdWords and Facebook advertiser accounts to play around.
So the way that this works is that you submit a request to Verizon asking about an IP address, Verizon sends it back to you, and then you decide whether to bid on the ad in a marketplace.
The problem arises when some shyster sends a request to Verizon asking, "Does this household both hit Christian sites and gay porn?" Gets a yes, serves an ad for a seminar "to use the power of God to drive homosexuality out of someone close to you", and triggers a very bad conversation between a closeted gay teenager and his very conservative parents...
https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2016/Fahrplan/events...
IIRC, AT&T basically has said they MITM all their fiber optic customers to insert ads and track browsing history.
I honestly can't come to a guess. On one hand, making the data anonymous would explain the interest in crazy fingerprinting methods and why companies that do that aren't very well known. On the other hand, I have no strong evidence to support the idea that an ISP would anonymize data given their history of activity in the name of profits and in spite of customer satisfaction.
Comcast selling any data is a concern, I will continue to assume my information is being collected and act as best as I can to prevent that (VPN, poisoning my dataflow,etc).
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/anonymity_and... [2] http://www.computerworld.com/article/3088179/apple-mac/what-...
It's not really aggregate data in the sense that any records about you are still individually separated. You're not anonymized by getting mixed into a bigger pool of data points.
The usual rule is that the buyer won't get your records by name but will know more or less where you live, how old you are, political leanings, hobbies and interests, etc.
So you have some anonymized ID number or set of cookies attached to you. However, if you think about it, from the perspective of the advertiser your name is one of the less valuable things about you.
So... you might be anonymous by name, but the name thing is a bit of a red herring.
The data may not say John Doe, but it's tied to John Doe's device. You can already identify that a user saw an ad on their laptop at home and showed up at a physical location because the mobile device is tied to the laptop and the mobile device spits out GPS data.
So yeah, they might not sell data that says this is John Doe, but it's John Doe and we know where he lives, where he travels, when he travels, etc.