"Regarding our retail Surfboard products, CommScope has no access or visibility to an individual users' web browsing history or the content of the network traffic flowing through these retail products," a company spokesperson said. "That's something we're kind of working on right now, internally."ĬommScope, too, says that its products don't collect a user's browsing history - though the company makes a distinction between retail products sold directly to consumers and the routers it provides via service partnerships with third-party partners, most notably internet service providers. "I will say our policy can be clearer," the spokesperson said. When I asked about that discrepancy, a TP-Link spokesperson explained that the cookies, tags and pixels mentioned in that California disclosure are referring to trackers used on TP-Link's website, and not referring to anything its routers are doing. "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. "However, your Google Wifi and Nest Wifi devices do collect data such as Wi-Fi channel, signal strength, and device types that are relevant to optimize your Wi-Fi performance." "Importantly, the Google Wifi app, Wifi features of the Google Home app, and your Google Wifi and Nest Wifi devices do not track the websites you visit or collect the content of any traffic on your network," Google's support page for Nest Wifi privacy reads. 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." I combed through about 30,000 words of terms of use and other policy documents as I tried to find answers for this post - but privacy policies typically aren't written with full transparency in mind. All of the problems with privacy policies
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