Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India
wsj.comThis should be a concern in the US as well. AT&T Uverse is said to be doing deep packet inspection on all unencrypted traffic unless subscribers pay an additional ~$744/year to opt-out.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/atts-p...
This should be a concern because such data on individual subscribers would be available to law enforcement and become a potential mechanism for highly detailed mass surveillance.
> unless subscribers pay an additional ~$744/year to opt-out
It probably goes on to suggest that this is the amount service providers expect to benefit per customer by inspecting your data. It's evident that those (including marketing agencies) who compensate the service providers in lieu of this data would benefit even more. Creepy world.
This is reality. The only reason they are giving out the service is against a legalized signatory from you saying they can monitor your usage
Kinda like Valentine from Kingsman.
I'm a bit apprehensive of their executive saying deep packet inspectionn will be the actual gold mine [http://qz.com/771690/reliance-jio-bombshell-the-good-the-bad...]
Quoting:
This essentially implies that they would earn more revenues by analyzing one's browsing behavior, performing analytics and selling the data. Awesome.Privacy: An unnamed Jio executive mentioned “deep packet inspection” to Reuters, saying: “It’s called deep packet inspection, and what you can do with the analytics of that is mind-boggling,” he said, referring to a practice that digs into “packets” of data created by computers for efficiency, mining them for information. If this is happening and Jio is accessing data packets to develop patterns of user data consumption, this is a major privacy violation. The company deserves to be taken to court for this, as much as the India needs a privacy law.Welcome to India!
I am not sure if "Big Data" is an accurate idea that fits Reliance's intentions to kick-start this. Surely, it sounds like a perfect recipe — onboard millions of customers and sell their 'data' — but on a secondary inspection it doesn't seems to be a smart idea.
Can you even imagine the scale needed to process this kind of data? That's petabytes (rough estimate), every day. Maybe, it's theoretically possible but any investment in this kind of technology would be enormous.
Browsing behaviour data maybe valuable but to what scale? Even a big advertising firm would balk at spending any big bucks for this and remember, the scale needed to mine any information out of this. How much valuable business insights can this generate that wasn't possible in the past?
Maybe I am wrong but I'd be very skeptical if selling is their master plan.
speaking from experience with dpi. We did a POC project on analysing dpi data with hadoop,spark and other big data data tech.
You are right about the volumes, but wrong about it being impractical.
The volumes with a relatively small opco:
- +-7m subs
- 250gb just for the protocol classification. *
- Then you also have url logs etc
Key factors that reduce the costs and investment:
- commodity hardware (with hadoop etc)
- distributed
- query patterns
- you do not need to store every single record. The data can be aggregated up to hourly, daily, monthly the older it is
This is what we did, data was aggregated which significantly reduced storage.
Tested various options: Hive, hbase, druid
Edit: * per day
Scale is not at all a problem here, but i am not sure how they plan to pull this off considering so many privacy violations.
Also, may be some people in India won't mind accepting this if Reliance gives LTE internet at very low cost, others might not just use it i guess.
This may well work though: http://time.com/4471451/cathy-oneil-math-destruction/
> This essentially implies that they would earn more revenues by analyzing one's browsing behavior, performing analytics and selling the data. Awesome. Welcome to India!
It's not like this is a uniquely Indian problem. The largest wireless provider in the US (Verizon) was caught doing basically exactly this, and other (broadband) telecom providers are trying to do the same.
Taking to court :) :) ... forget it...
I am reasonably sure that all other telecoms are doing this already. Attitude towards privacy of an average Indian leans towards "don't care". We seem to think privacy in numbers or something.
Well if huge number of people are living in or very close to poverty I do not think data privacy is very high on their priority.
Yes it is true , very few people may about privacy and they wikl use VPN softwares on mobiles. Rest don't bother. Even if you run http site for user name password it is ok here except for financial transaction. But i am sure irrespective of the vendors all providers can do what they want the license of ISP they have but they need to keep meta data and they provide it to government as and when requested by Dept of Telecom , no warrant or court order required as it is covered in ISP license and CAF agreement with customer. This applies to all internet connection not just retail customers. I know airtel injects a page when i run out of the bandwidth even though my dns is google DNS.I would rather fight for food safety, health safety and garbage collection in cities(None of the major cities know how to do it and IT Hub is full of garbage everywhere) etc... than worry about any of these
Data privacy shouldn't be a privilege for the wealthy. All internet users deserve the same rights in this regard.
Question is: Should poor people not be allowed to forfeit some rights for things that they value more? In other words, should poor people not be allowed to enter into a contract?
That's exactly what a CONTRACT is: Giving up some rights, in return for things that you didn't deserve before.
People living close to poverty aren't going to be buying LTE phones or modems anytime soon.
I've been using the network (Jio) for about a month now. The service is great, but the paranoid in me is genuinely worried about Jio ending up having a Verizon-NSA like partnership with the Indian Govt. (they probably already have).
No one will dare question it because we have idiots for politicians and we are nowhere close to having a privacy law for our citizens.
Is VPN, Whonix, Tor (in essence compartmentalization) a good combination to escape their monitoring capabilities?
HTTPS will allow them to only see the domain. Tor stops the domain from being revealed to them.
Pushing for the entire internet to use https is hard. Pushing for ISPs to be barred from reading http pages is easier.
My (Indian) landline ISP even writes to http pages, injecting ads for higher tier internet plans and letting me know that I've reached my data cap (after which I still have internet, but at a reduced speed).
Tor is good, but slow, and many websites block it or show captchas.
> My (Indian) landline ISP even writes to http pages, injecting ads for higher tier internet plans
I've now gotten used to pages not opening up due to ad-blockers; I refuse to disable those. It may not be all that bad to shun sites that refuse to display content upon detecting ad-blockers.
> Tor is good, but slow, and many websites block it or show captchas.
And then you have Cloudflare.
> It may not be all that bad to shun sites that refuse to display content upon detecting ad-blockers
Not sure how this is relevant; I'm talking about my ISP modifying my packets to include its own ads. The websites have no hand in this aside from the choice to use http.
While I don't like ads, I personally don't use an adblocker (just Firefox's tracking protection, which still triggers antiadblock).
I've used websites with Cloudflare over Tor. There's a CAPTCHA that takes about 10-20 seconds to solve, and then you can continue browsing the site.
> Pushing for ISPs to be barred from reading http pages is easier.
That's needed, but even then any random person who intercepts the cables can read your data. Or with WPA2-PSK, anybody with the password can read your data. So, treat HTTP as in the clear; it's likely someone's watching.
> Tor is good, but slow, and many websites block it or show captchas.
Tor has high latency, but the bandwidth is not that bad. CAPTCHAs only take 20 seconds per site. Other points are true.
This is not what the hype is making it out to be.
The average monthly indian mobile monthly revenue is b/w 150-200rs ($2-$3). The hype is that a user gets a GB of data for Rs 50 (~$1).
But if you look deeper, that's just the rate of charge/GB. The initial plan is still Rs 150 per month (for a paltry 0.3GB of data with free voice). This is better than the current market, but only marginally, not substantially or revolutionary. Heck that fact that the next big plan is Rs 500, and nothing between the basic and the next big plan shows they expect a significant number of users to jump onto the Rs 500 plan. [1]
[1] http://i.imgur.com/IknpMek.jpg
What's going to happen is the 6 other network providers will huddle in their respective HQs and come out with equivalent plans within a fortnight.
But definite kudos to Jio for stirring up the market a little.
what speed do you get ? where are you located at ?
I watched a premier league game via star sports on 3G on a train from Mumbai to Goa once. Seemed better than the 3G in London...
I'm in West Africa now. The 3G here is much faster than in Canada. Cheaper too.
To be fair, nearly every country seems to be cheaper than Canada for mobile service.
Non paywalled article by NDTV http://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news/reliance-jio-plans-reve...
Doesn't show anything if you're using an ad-blocker. Effectively paywalled.
Yes, but you can use noscript [1] and it works fine then.
This is huge. Quoting from a piece linked below.
"Now, here’s my not-so-big bet: Jio will not make its magic number of 100 million customers in one year. The person who offers me the best odds before end of Saturday on a $200 bottle of a single malt is on.
In fact, more from my smoky mirror: Jio will struggle for at least a few years before it starts making a dent in the telecom market." http://goo.gl/hH7Fai
Please don't use link-shorteners to hide the link unnecessarily, especially if it is from your own publication. (I love Factordaily, but this is needless).
Link: http://factordaily.com/mukesh-ambani-reliance-jio-launch-imp...
I hope he will provide some Internet access to rural areas as well. There are several villages where there is no Internet access or poorer connectivity.
Data is now the new oil according to reliance. "One company insider said the Jio logo is actually a mirror image of the word ‘oil,’ reflecting in a way Reliance’s journey from oil drilling to data mining"
Very exciting...I hope this works and they are able to bring half a billion people in remote areas online. Also interesting that they are future proof so their Infrastructure is ready for 5G and 6G.
As people are mostly consuming data on mobile plans, doesn't the company get some of the costs back from peering backbone providers who have to pay to reach the end users?
Frankly there is something off about the separation and pricing of internet vs "internet via wifi/hotspot" on their service.
That was always there for US consumers. Now the indian players are adopting it
WSJ.com asks to sign in to read full content. Not cool man.