Hands off our packets, it's the law
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When Telstra sent Next G customers' web-browsing history offshore, it failed in its duty as a common carrier, according to Geoff Huston, the chief scientist of regional internet registry Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC).
Telstra said that no personal information was collected, and that it was reporting newly discovered URLs to internet content-filtering company Netsweeper as part of its development of a new add-on filtering service for the Next G mobile network.
But as Huston explained in his personal blog post entitled "All Your Packets Belong to Us", he believes that this constitutes an illegal communications intercept.
"It seems that such actions are way beyond the terms and conditions of the Australian Telecommunications Act, in so far as that parts of a user's conversation have been intercepted by the public carrier, recorded and then sent to a third party without consent. All this without any form of identified operational necessity in terms of the wellbeing and integrity of the network itself," he wrote.
"It was a case of stalking, and that is not part of the legitimate role of a common carrier."
On this week's Patch Monday podcast, Huston describes how he sees the role of the internet as a common carrier. Service providers should be protecting the privacy of our communications in all except very limited circumstances — just like the telephone and post office before them.
That common carrier role is being eroded, as communications companies increasingly see the data stream as something to be monitored and even monetised. Part of the problem, says Huston, is the assumption that everything not encrypted is public.
"I have to expose something to you in order to communicate, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you and I have broadcast that to the world," he said.
"This de facto assumption that everything on the net, everything I publish, is public is a false assumption, and I think that's part of this erosion of privacy."
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Running time: 29 minutes, 09 seconds