Torontoist has an scary interesting article about how Rogers is watching you surf the web by inspecting the packages that are sent to your IP.

Of course they’re disguising it as “a friendly reminder” that you may be approaching your monthly bandwidth limit by inserting their content into other people’s pages. How do they do this? Easy, they inspect the request packet when you call up Google.ca and add on their “notice” into the header of Google’s web page. This is “data shaping” at work. They know exactly what you are doing on the web, much like a bitter IT manager at your office, and are manipulating the content in their favour.

The sinister aspect of this is that Rogers is testing their network to be able to deliver their ads on web pages that may match what their selling. You call up The Globe and Mail and across the top is an extra banner for one of Roger’s many magazines. Oh goody! More ads! Why else would they be developing this? Has their autoresponse emailer broke?

Does anyone remember when you would get spam through the Instant Messenger service on your computer (not the chat program, but the Network administrator notification app)? Remember how even Microsoft recommended you disable it for home use to avoid this spam? Now how do we disable our IP?