They don't care about ethics if it gets in the way of making money. That's the beast that is capitalism.
They aren't doing blockings of individuals here, they are looking at aggregate traffic to certain sites, and literally every ISP on the world does that because they need to optimise their peering arrangements for high traffic, high QoS sites (such as installing OpenCache for Netflix).
It's also a vastly different type of aggregation.
Is it? If they send it to a third party technical subcontractor for internal network management is that bad? If they publish a chart publicly of the top ten websites our users visit is that bad? (That's very common).
If they pass the data to geofiltering vendors to use for threat intelligence to reduce DDOS attacks is that bad? Fraud?
What exactly is the obvious line here that you think exists, other than "I don't like copyright."
Imagine McDonald's selling data to your insurance provider so they can help determine your rates etc..
It's definitely out of bounds and worth putting up a fuss over.
Then they share some of that data with 3rd-parties. That's not information about their customers; it's the IP addresses of IPTV servers they've been streaming from.
They could be sharing information about which customers have been streaming from those addresses; but that's not what the article is claiming.
I subscribe to Sky satellite for TV. I get my broadband elsewhere. The Sky box is not susceptible to inspection, and since it integrates online "catchup" services, it might well be using my broadband connection to send home information about my viewing habits.
The Sky box also creates a shadow wifi network, by default. The shadow network uses at least two wifi channels. On the face of it, this is to allow multiple Sky boxes on the same household account to communicate with one-another, share recordings and so on. I'm not keen to have wifi networks I don't control piggy-backing on my ISP connection; and since I only have a single Sky box, I disable toe wifi.
I trust Sky as far as I could throw them, so I have plans to find out what my Sky box is talking to, and firewall it.
Would certainly be a fascinating project to MITM and figure out exactly what is being sent.
In the UK all phone providers are required to keep all call logs, location data etc for six months to hand over to the government in a variety of circumstances, so that ship sailed a long time ago.
However, that is the most broken comparison I could possibly imagine, so no.
Got to wonder if simply using a VPN would sort the problem out or if they could make the case in court that the volume of traffic and the time it was downloaded matches the pirate stream.
Seems dubious.
Makes me wonder if we (technically proficient users) are coming at this from the wrong angle. Ads? No problem, adblock. Bittorrent scare letters? No problem, VPN. Tracking? No problem, pihole/firefox/linux/lineageos/whatever.
We are solving these problems at the wrong end and are leaving less-capable users behind.