The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) has been incredibly interested in Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies, and prominently demonstrated their concerns with the technology in the comment they filed to the CRTC about Internet Service Providers’ traffic management practices. As of today the OPC’s DPI website has gone online – it’s got a great set of mini-essays on various elements of the technology, and lets visitors leave comments and engage with each piece. They’ve done a stellar job – if you’re interesting in DPI and its privacy implications, I highly recommend visiting/bookmarking it.
As a note: if you want to get a grasp on what the Deep Packet Inspection is, and how it works, before jumping into its privacy implications I’ve developed an accessible working paper entitled “Deep Packet Inspection in Perspective: Tracing its lineage and surveillance potentials” for the New Transparency Project.