February 19, 2002 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Comcast Corp. (comcast.com) said last Wednesday that itwould stop recording Web browsing activities of high-speed Internetsubscribers, after a congressman said the communications provider may havebroken federal law.
Comcast’s cable division president, Stephen Burke, said the company willstop collecting the information “to completely reassure our customers thatthe privacy of their information is secure,” reported Ted Bridis ofAssociated Press yesterday.
Inquiries by Congress privacy advocate Rep. Edward Markey came a day afterAssociated Press reported that Comcast had started recording theircustomers’ visits to Web sites, without notifying them. Comcast later saidthe decision was part of a technology reorganization to save money andincrease network speed, and was not meant to infringe on the privacy oftheir one million subscibers.
Legal experts said Comcast’s online activity data would be widely availableto police and the FBI if under court orders, and would be obtainable bylawyers in civil lawsuits. “Any service provider should be very sensitive toany kinds of logging activity, because that information becomes a honey potfor government requests,” James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy andTechnology told AP.
Comcast said in a statement Wednesday that the information, which had beencollected over the past six weeks, was only temporarily stored and purgedautomatically every few days, and “has never been connected to individualsubscribers.”
Markey, the ranking Democrat on the House Commerce subcommittee ontelecommunications and the Internet, wrote Comcast president Brian Robertsthat he was worried about “the nature and extent of any transgressions ofthe law that may have resulted in consumer privacy being compromised.”Markey later praised Comcast for reversing its decision.
Markey said the 1984 Cable Act prohibits companies from collecting personalinformation from its Internet subscribers without obtaining “prior writtenor electronic consent.” The act’s was originally intended to protect theprivacy of cable TV customers. However, the law does permit cable operatorsto collect private information if it can show it is needed to operate itsservice.
