ISP-Enabled Behavioral Ad Targeting without Deep Packet Inspection

Online advertising is a rapidly growing industry currently dominated by the search engine 'Giant' Google. In an attempt to tap into this huge market, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) started deploying deep packet inspection techniques to track and collect user browsing behavior. However, such techniques violate wiretap laws that explicitly prevent intercepting the contents of communication without gaining consent from consumers. In this paper, the authors show that it is possible for ISPs to extract user browsing patterns without inspecting contents of communication.