Forrester has come out with a report that, in Susana Schwartz’s summary, “suggests that more should be done to integrate data about [ISPs’] customers’ online behaviours to offline systems.” In effect, to assist ISPs monetize their networks they need to aggregate a lot more data, in very intelligent ways. The killer section of the actual report is summarized by a Forrester researcher as follows;

“By integrating online and offline data, operators and their enterprise customers could add information about customers’ online behaviors to existing customer profiles so that CSRs could more efficiently handle calls and provide more relevant cross sell/upsell opportunities,” Stanhope said. “So much of the customer experience now comes from online activities that there is a huge repository of data that should be pushed deeper into enterprises for insights about interactions; enterprises collect so much data about what people do and see on their Web sites, yet they do little to draw insight.”

The aim of this is to ‘help’ customers find services they unknowingly are interested in, while making ‘more intelligence’ available to customer service representatives when customers call in. We’re talking about a genuinely massive aggregation of data that goes through ISP gateways and a dissolution of Chinese firewalls that presently segregate network logs with (most) subscriber information. Just so you don’t think that I’m reading into this too deeply, Stanhope (a senior analyst of consumer intelligence with Forrester Research) said to Schwartz:

Our clients are starting to plan for and lay the technical foundational by looking at how to bring together disparate environments, like CRM databases and customer databases, and then what they have to do to gather Web data, social media and search data so they can leverage what they already have … Many are now starting to look at how that can be a hub for Web data, which can be leveraged by other systems.

It’s this kind of language that gets privacy advocates both annoyed and worried. Annoyed, because such a massive aggregation and usage of personal data would constitute a gross privacy violation – both in terms of national laws and social norms – and worried because of the relative opaque curtain separating their investigations from the goings-on of ISPs. When we read words such as Stanhope’s, correlate it with the vendor-speak surrounding deep packet inspection, and look at the technology’s usage in developing consumer profiles, there is a feeling that everyone is saying that DPI won’t and can’t be used for massive data aggregation as configured…but it could and (Stanhope hopes) likely will once the time is right.

Canada has a strong regulatory position against the use of DPI or other network forensics for the kind of actions that Stanhope is encouraging. This said, given that ‘research’ groups like Forrester along with other parties that pitch products to ISPs are making similar noises (as demonstrated at last year’s Canadian Telecom Summit) a nagging pit in my stomach reminds me that constant vigilance is required to maintain those regulatory positions and keep ISPs from bitting into a very profitable – but poisonous for Canadians’ privacy – apple.