Telstra has confirmed it is tracking websites visited by its mobile users in the lead up to a launch of a new web filtering solution.
Days after suspicions of Telstra’s networking monitoring activity was first aroused, the telco has revealed it captures web addresses visited by millions of subscribers on its Next G network.
The addresses are compared to a blacklist of criminal sites curated by web filtering company Netsweeper, and held both in Australia and the US.
Users first noticed the new activity when they directed their Telstra devices to the telco’s web servers and noticed it was also visited split seconds after by a Chicago IP address, believed to be held in a Rackspace facility.
Network engineers and users on the Whirlpool user forums suspected the activity was a marketing effort used to gather intelligence on the activities of Telstra customers.
A spokesman for the telco told SC last week that the activity was part of a “normal network operation”.
However, Telstra has since clarified that the activity was conducted ahead of a launch of a voluntary web filtering offering for mobile users.
Spokesman James Howe told SC that user data was “completely anonymised” before it was sent offshore to be compared against Netsweeper’s URL blacklist.
He was unable to confirm if users could opt-out of the data slurping procedure at the time of writing.
Telstra was waiting on confirmation from its legal team before it is expected to issue a statement later today.
The monitoring appears to relate to an as-yet-unreleased feature dubbed “Smart Controls” that would allow users to access “mobile internet browsing restrictions and call restrictions on Telstra mobile services”.
According to Telstra documentation (pdf) updated after SC approached the telco for comment, users who opt into the “Smart Control” feature would pay $2.95 per month for the ability to restrict internet access on mobiles associated with their account based on specific URLs and content categories, or allow access to only specific URLs.
The feature would only be available to newer Telstra customers — those on its Siebel-based billing system. It would also provide regular reports of internet use for users when the Smart Controls function is enabled.
“Whilst we take care in filtering content based on the preset internet categories, we cannot guarantee that any or all of the content will be filtered accurately or in accordance with these categories,” the documentation reads.
The filtering appears to be only restricted to Telstra mobiles operating over the Next G network; those accessing the internet over a local wi-fi connection would not face the same restrictions.