![]() ![]() ![]() All of them are going to use that data to augment profiles they already have about you."ĬommScope notes that the way it handles and shares data used for performance analytics with its Arris Surfboard routers constitutes a sale of personal data under California law. "The company is going to share it with a number of advertising companies who might share it downstream with a number of other, vaguely ad-related companies. "When data is used to target ads, it's usually not just used by the company that's collecting the data," said Cyphers. The danger is that a company might share it with a third party outside of its control, that would then be free to use and share your data however it likes. Using your data for marketing often means that your data is being shared with third parties. In most cases, your router will also collect personal data, location data, and other identifiers - and like I said, every company I looked into acknowledged that it uses data like that for marketing purposes in one way or another. Much of this is technical data about your network and the devices that use it that the manufacturer needs to keep things running smoothly and to detect potential threats or other issues. Ry Crist/CNET Where exactly is my router data going?Įven if your router isn't tracking the specific websites you visit, it's still collecting data as you use it. "Netgear routers do not track any user web activity or browsing history except in cases where a user opts in to a service and only to provide information to the user," a Netgear spokesperson said, offering the examples of parental controls that allow you to see the sites your child has visited, or cybersecurity features that let you know what sites have been automatically blocked. "Asus routers do not track what the user is browsing nor do our routers include targeting or advertising cookies," an Asus spokesperson said. "Eero does not track and does not have the capability to track customer internet browsing activity," an Eero spokesperson shared. Though none of them indicate as much in their privacy policies, representatives for five of them - Eero, Asus, Netgear, TP-Link and CommScope (which makes and sells Arris Surfboard networking products) - told me that their products do not track the sites that users visit on the web. I asked each of the six other companies I looked into for this post whether or not they tracked the websites their users visit. Every major manufacturer I looked into discloses that it collects some form of user data for the purpose of marketing - but almost none of the policies I read included any language that explicitly answered the question of whether or not a user should expect their web history to be logged or recorded. Is my router really tracking the websites I visit?Īlmost all of the web traffic in your home passes through your router, so maybe it's difficult to imagine that it isn't tracking the websites that you're visiting as you browse. You can find more details on that in the "Is my data being sold?" section. *CommScope, which manufactures Arris networking products, claims that it does not sell data collected from products, but rather, that some of its business operations including order fulfillment and data analytics may constitute a sale under California law. Shares Personal Data with Outside Third PartiesĪllows Users to Opt Out of Data Collection That means that much of what's written might not even be relevant to routers. Even worse, many of these policies are written to cover the entire company in question, including all of its products, services and websites, as well as the way it handles data from sales transactions and even job applications. He's not wrong: Most of the privacy policies I reviewed for this post included plenty of the "wiggle cover" Cyphers described, with broad, vague language and relatively few actual specifics. "That doesn't necessarily mean that the company is doing the worst thing you could imagine, but it means that they have wiggle cover if they choose to do bad stuff with your data." "Often, what you'll see is language that says, 'we collect X, Y and Z data, and we might share it with our business partners, and we may share it for any of these seven different reasons', and all of them are very vague," Cyphers continued. "All a privacy policy can really do is tell you with some confidence that something bad is not going to happen," said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist with the privacy-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation, "but it won't tell you if something bad is going to happen." ![]()
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