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.
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.
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...]
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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
Link: http://factordaily.com/mukesh-ambani-reliance-jio-launch-imp...
