Your Home’s Router is Spying on You

It must be spy on American’s week given posts on law enforcement asking for your cell data and how the NSA is going to expand its spying on Americans on a massive scale.  Now we have this:

Cisco Systems told users of its new high-end home routers — in a roundabout way — they couldn’t use their routers for porn or to send certain types of e-mail and a whole list of other things.  …

Last week, Cisco sent out an upgrade to the software that makes its routers work, called firmware. The upgrade affected two models, the EA4500 and the EA2700. Without asking, Cisco moved them to its “Cisco Connect Cloud” service.  …

[T]he Cisco Connect Cloud Terms of Service forbids a whole bunch of things including porn, sending advertising e-mails — it won’t even allow you to “encourage any conduct” that would violate the law.

Wait, there’s more. Cisco reportedly [also] deleted a portion of [its] privacy statement that said Cisco would keep track of Connect Cloud customers’ “network traffic” and “Internet history,” ExtremeTech reported.

via Business Insider.

Does anyone think any company could have gotten away with this in the 1960’s or 1970’s?  The outrage would have been tremendous.

We’re failing as a society to realize that it’s not polite to air our collective and individual dirty laundry.  And we should be especially wary of sharing our family business with corporations that usually have a cozy relationship with the government.

This is very very very bad.

In addition to establishing Internet Freedoms and Net Neutrality we need to start a national discussion on Internet Privacy.