Update: Since the practice of redirecting users' searches was first exposed by New Scientist last week, we have learned that all the ISPs involved have now called a halt to the practice. They continue to intercept some queries ? those from Bing and Yahoo ? but are passing the searches on to the relevant search engine rather than redirecting them.
Original story posted on 4 August 2011
Searches made by millions of internet users are being hijacked and redirected by some internet service providers in the US. Patents filed by Paxfire, the company involved in the hijacking, suggest that it may be part of a larger plan to allow ISPs to generate revenue by tracking the sites their customers visit. It may also be illegal.
Reese Richman, a New York law firm that specialises in consumer protection lawsuits, today filed a class action against one of the ISPs and Paxfire, which researchers believe provided the equipment used to hijack and redirect the searches. The suit, filed together with Milberg, another New York firm, alleges that the process violated numerous statutes, including wiretapping laws.
The hijacking seems to target searches for certain well-known brand names only. Users entering the term "apple" into their browser's search bar, for example, would normally get a page of results from their search engine of choice. The ISPs involved in the scheme intercept such requests before they reach a search engine, however. They pass the search to an online marketing company, which directs the user straight to Apple's online retail website.
More than 10 ISPs in the US, which together have several million subscribers, are redirecting queries in this way (see below for a complete list). None of the companies would comment on the redirection scheme, but evidence collected by Christian Kreibich and Nicholas Weaver at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, who discovered the redirection and have been monitoring it for several months, suggest that the process generates revenue for the ISPs.
The Berkeley team has identified 165 search terms, from "apple" and "dell" to "safeway" and "bloomingdales", that are passed to marketing companies and then redirected to the appropriate retail website. The marketing companies include organisations like Commission Junction, a Santa Barbara, California, a firm that retailers pay to supply traffic to their websites.
Organisations that provide Commission Junction with traffic, which may include Paxfire and the ISPs the Berkeley team monitored, receive a cut of any purchase their users make. The cut is typically around 3?per cent. Commission Junction said that it was investigating the behaviour identified by the Berkeley researchers.
Buy, buy, buy
The process is highly contentious. A user who searched for "apple" would easily have found the company's store via a search engine, so Apple may be needlessly sharing revenue with Commission Junction and the ISPs. Search engines are also being deprived of traffic intended for them. The ISPs are understood to have stopped redirecting Google search traffic after the company complained to them earlier this year. All the ISPs identified by the Berkeley team redirect some Bing and Yahoo searches.
The redirection can also produce unwanted results. A user wanting to read an article in The Wall Street Journal, for instance, might search for "wsj"; the redirection system would take them to a page offering subscription deals for the paper. Searches for "kindle" are sent to Amazon, the company that makes the e-book reader of that name. A normal search for the term provides links to Wikipedia, reviews of the device and links to Kindles for sale on eBay.
"This interception and alteration of search traffic is not just your average privacy problem," says Peter Eckersley at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based internet advocacy group that helped the Berkeley team investigate the ISPs. "This is a deep violation of users' trust and expectations about how the internet is supposed to function."
It is not the first time that the desire of ISPs to monitor and monetise the traffic they carry has led to controversy. In 2008, service providers in the UK suffered a backlash after it emerged that they were working with Phorm, a company that developed techniques for tracking the interests and activities of internet users. Advertisers and publishers already track users' browsing, but ISPs are in a particularly powerful position because they can observe almost everything we do online. Many users complained about Phorm's data collection, prompting several ISPs to sever links with the company.
Paxfire connection
In this case, examination of the redirected traffic has led the Berkeley team to believe that the service is provided by Paxfire. The firm, based in Sterling, Virginia, has provided advertising services to ISPs since it was founded in 2003. As well as using Paxfire to redirect specific queries, the ISPs pass many, or perhaps all, searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo through Paxfire servers ? a process that places Paxfire in a similar position to Phorm.
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