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Deep Packet Inspection Paper

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By subscribing to AT&T's Gigapower internet service and taking them up on their discounted Premier Offer, users are opting into take part of AT&T Internet Preferences. From the FAQ, it states that "your Internet traffic is routed to AT&T Internet Preferences web browsing and analytics platform" which strongly implies that AT&T is applying deep packet inspection methods to offer targeted advertising.

(Retrieved from ATT's FAQ page, see [2])

Deep Packet Inspection
Deep packet inspection, as opposed to shallow packet inspection, is the practice of analyzing the contents of internet packets all the way to the application layer, In the context of AT&T's Internet Preferences, AT&T may be applying deep packet inspection to take a look into non-encrypted HTTP traffic to gather information about users. The information, in this context, would then be used for targeted advertising purposes. DPI has been the center of many privacy and net neutrality discussions because of the possible privacy and net neutrality violations the practice could afford. DPI could be applied by government agencies to monitor traffic or censor traffic, ISPs could use DPI to shape traffic (ie slow down a content provider until the user or provider pays more). …show more content…

As searches through Google are now through HTTPS [6], the first proposed example that AT&T provides of searching for concert tickets and receiving targeted ads for nearby restaurants would not be directly possible. (However if the user followed a link from Google to an unencrypted website for concert tickets, this targeted ad would still be

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