Cable giant Comcast has been hit with a multi-million dollar lawsuit on behalf of its broadband Internet access customers alleging that individual Web surfing habits were tracked and recorded by Comcast’s software. Comcast admitted in a February 2002 statement that it had tracked such information dating back to December 2001, but promised that, "Beginning immediately, we will stop storing this individual customer information in order to completely reassure our customers that the privacy of their information is secure." The statement asserted that, "This information has never been connected to individual subscribers…."
The class action lawyer who brought the action says that Comcast’s claim that it only tracked the information by IP address and not by customers’ names is like a telephone company saying it did not track individual data by customer name, only by telephone number. "I am not given much solace by the fact that they did not happen to run the software program that would have
