Last month we told you how ISPs are surreptitiously injecting their own ads into your browsing experience, in an effort to cash in on the Internet advertising frenzy (like those “Ads by Gooooooogle”).
Up until now it wasn’t easy to tell if your ISP was doing it, unless you looked closely at the ads, or were otherwise very observant and knew what to look for. But now you can bust them!
A group of researchers at the University of Washington have developed a way to test whether your ISP is doing this to you. Basically, the way it works is that you go to the page that they have developed, which analyzes whether you are receiving their page unchanged, or whether your ISP has altered it to inject their ads into the page.
At last check they had found 305 unique instances of a user seeing altered web pages, with ads injected by the ISPs, from four different ISPs. There is no word, yet, on who those four ISPs are – if you find out that yours is doing it, please let us know!
To test it out for yourself, go to the [Page no longer available – we have linked to the archive.org version instead].
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[Ed. note: The subdomain for the Washington University ISP ad checker is “vancouver”. While we don’t know for certain, it may be that this is an homage to the Vancouver volcanology base station that monitored – and lost their own David Johnston to – the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, when Johnston famously radioed back to the Vancouver station “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!” moments before perishing in the eruption.]
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
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I WAS SAFE I’M TOLD !!
Using RR. Nothing here… I wonder about the efficacy of this test.
I just tested my ISP (Verizon) and found it was safe — no changes.