Comcast is working very hard to track what you do. According to a Blog on wordpress they are scanning and capturing traffic on port 53 and redirecting it to their own DNS servers.
You probably heard of this before - What would happen is that if you mistyped a website address it would redirect you to one of Comcast’s pages that are full of ad links. However once the blog got spread around the internet Comcast stopped the snooping and all is well again. Now this may sound like nothing more than in inconvenience but in reality it represents something much larger and more sinister.
It is not merely an issue of Comcast redirecting unsuspecting users to a page full of Comcast customer ads it is in the simple fact that they are sniffing the packets coming out of your system. This means that they can also track everything you do on the internet, even if you do not use their DNS servers.
Comcast has been in the news before for this type of behavior when they setup throttling on customers using P2P or with high bandwidth usage. They put this into action without informing any of their customers and got a nice slap on the wrist from the FCC. Later they put in very restrictive traffic shaping plans that had to be reviewed by the FCC and were eventually relaxed at the FCC’s request.
Now it would seem they were working on sniffing all packets coming out of port 53. Maybe just to make a few extra dollars on their ads but I would not be surprised if they were working on a means of sniffing the DNS requests of all of their customers for future RIAA/MPAA cooperation.
The situation bears watching as it really does push the limits of legality in terms of how Comcast controls and monitors their customers’ actions on the Internet.
