Congress wants to know: How do search engines use your personal data? The House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent out letters on Friday to major network companies asking them, among other things, how they use personal tracking data to serve up those highly targeted ads. According to a statement posted on the Committee's Web site, top cable, Internet and phone companies have been asked to come clean about how they collect Web-browsing details. The investigation was triggered by the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet hearing on July 17 that focused on deep-packet inspection techniques. The letter "respectfully requests" responses to the Committee's 11 question by Friday, August 8. "Online users have a right to explicitly know when their provider is tracking their activity and collecting potentially sensitive and personal information," said Rep. Edward Markey, a chairman of the Subcommittee.

Deep Packets Lead to Deep Pockets?
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is an enterprise security technique for examining the Layer 2 through Layer 7 segments of IP data packets. This "packet snooping" was developed to better guard against malicious software, worms or erroneous data that may be embedded in IP packets by hackers or other unauthorized network users. But the same techniques applied for the good of network security can also be deployed to track an individual's Web activity.
Congress wants to know who is using DPI and how they are using it. The larger question is, of course, are individual rights being violated when DPI is used by networks?
Search engine companies in particular may depend heavily on DPI or variations thereof to provide more targeted ads to customers using their sites. In addition, large copyright holders such as Sony, EMI and Time Warner have sued Internet service providers that they believe have not done enough to halt the illicit trafficking of...

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