Sonic.net CEO: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your ISP Should, Too.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/06/22/ceo-of-internet-provider-sonic-net-we-delete-user-logs-after-two-weeks-your-internet-provider-should-too/

by simba-hiiipower • 14 years ago

167 62 14 years ago

forbes.com

jc4p• 14 years ago

Interesting back-and-forth, but seeing sites like this really makes me appreciate having Readability one button away. The combination of the huge banner and the facepile on the bottom of the screen make it very distracting to read.

RKearney• 14 years ago

Not to mention my Ghostery Chrome Extension found 25 tracking sites on the page.

  * 24/7 Media
  * Advertising.com
  * AppNexus
  * Bizo  
  * BlueKai  
  * DoubleClick  
  * eXelate  
  * Facebook Connect  
  * ForeSee  
  * Gigya Beacon  
  * Gigya Socialize  
  * Google +1  
  * Google AdWords Conversion  
  * Google Analytics  
  * Invite Media  
  * Krux Digital  
  * Legolas Media  
  * Media Innovation Group  
  * Right Media  
  * ScoreCard Research Beacon  
  * ShareThis  
  * TargusInfo  
  * Turn  
  * Vertical Acuity  
  * Visual Revenue

I think that's a little excessive, especially for an article about keeping logs.

shellox• 14 years ago

maybe you should recommend them some other tracking sites, so that they can add them to their collection ;)

taylorbuley2• 14 years ago

Many of our programmers and writers agree. We're an advertising-based business (free online news) so I view this as one consequence of that

A small chunk of these are due to social and other 3rd party features, a good chunk plain old analytics tracking, and another small chunk are due to our "brand lift" advertising guarantees (e.g. in some cases its ensured that readers are actually seeing your below-the-fold advertisements before we charge you for them).

That said, yes, more than a few Ghostery hits are so we can, e.g., buy an ad to reach Forbes readers when you're visiting Adweek.com or something. Ghostery is great and a useful instruction tool for showing the "boiling frog" that is pixels.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

> I think that's a little excessive, especially for an article about keeping logs.

Well, it's a corporate decision on the part of Forbes, so there's no point in blaming the journalist who wrote this particular article.

alexpoon06• 14 years ago

My name is Alex Poon. I am the head of engineering at Visual Revenue. Being a provider of analytics and optimization services, it is hard, if not impossible to piggyback on other data providers for data. We pay great attention to user experience of our customers and work to ensure that we don't cause any delay or breakage to their sites. Regarding individual user logs, we delete them immediately after data is aggregated.

jedberg• 14 years ago

I love sonic. We used them for the reddit office. They were the cheapest and fastest option. Once one of their reps stopped by just to say hi and make sure we were happy.

I've been begging them to let me give them money for my home connection.

latchkey3• 14 years ago

As a Sonic.net customer for the past 7 years and a friend of Jake's, I applaud their efforts to not keep logs. That said, I'm curious what logs they are talking about.

dsr_2• 14 years ago

Assignment of IP addresses, through DHCP or other methods.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

I wish I lived somewhere where I could use Sonic. Anyone who does should, IMHO, give them careful consideration when purchasing connectivity.

And... if you live in Sebastopol or, I think, one of a limited number of other trial areas, affordable Gb connectivity!

Aside from just offering better choices, we need Sonic and the like to push the BigCo's to do better. (Speaking as someone trapped in a BigCo oligopoly zone (BOZ?).)

simba-hiiipower2• 14 years ago

couldn’t agree more. and after reading this and looking into it a bit, as well as seeing all the praise coming-in, really wish they operated in my area. here's to hoping an expansion to the east coast doesn’t take too long.

iandanforth2• 14 years ago

I have Sonic at home, and applaud this log deletion policy. There's only one thing that bothers me about Sonic, the marketing vs reality of DSL.

Their marketing: $39.95/m for speeds up to 20Mbps

Their reality: ~$50/m for ~8Mbps

Now I continue to pay despite this discrepancy. I just wish there was more of an 'under-promise, over-deliver' mindset in their marketing dept.

bentlegen• 14 years ago

I presume you're referring to their DSL service, in which case performance depends upon the distance between your home and their access node.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r26910859-New-Fusion-a...

abalone• 14 years ago

No DSL provider can do that. Speeds depend on your distance from their facilities. To their credit, they tell you your distance when you fill out the service availability form, which you can use to get a rough idea of the quality of service you can expect.

I'd say sonic offers the best DSL service of any provider. I switched from att to sonic and got much better speeds over the same lines, probably thanks to a better backend setup. This privacy policy is another example of that.

rdl• 14 years ago

With Sonic, I get 26/6 using annex B near a CO with the two-line bonded fusion dsl at one site. ($80/mo; the next step up would be $1k/mo for 30/30)

6/1 at another site, so there we use Comcast Business instead.

obtu• 14 years ago

Note the "up to". Also that they probably give you ATM throughput, which adds 20% overhead to IP throughput. But the most important factor you're missing is distance; see these graphs: http://www.pcinpact.com/news/71764-vdsl2-sfr-fibre-optique-f...

shahidhussain• 14 years ago

I used Sonic when I lived in SF. Dane himself tweeted back when I mentioned them, and their customer service has been super transparent (you can see on their support page [1] how many calls are on and waiting), extremely honest and helpful, even for a nerd like me.

I have nothing but admiration for these guys.

[1] http://www.sonic.net/support/index.shtml

wpietri• 14 years ago

Yes. Love these guys. Every time I call support I get to talk to somebody with both knowledge and sense. In sharp contrast to when I had AT&T DSL or have to deal with Comcast for friends.

lrem2• 14 years ago

Your ISP should, unless you live in a country that does prevent that. There's a law in European Union requiring us to keep logs between 6 months and 2 years. Oh, and there are countries like Poland, whose government asked to prolong that time, as 2 years is not enough (thankfully that was rejected).

It's still a surprise to me that USA doesn't have anything like that. It's like the first time EU is first at something ;)

swang• 14 years ago

It's because Law Enforcement in the US has been lobbying for longer times. From the article:

DJ: I would speculate it would be an unpopular move that might result in more friction with law enforcement. Law enforcement has been lobbying to pass laws that would require service providers to keep 18-36 months of logs. It’s in their interests.

lrem2• 14 years ago

Oh cool... Polish government tried to enforce 10 or 15 years. We were discussing whether to keep it for them as printouts in 4 points font, or just as single copies of cheapest dvds ;) Thankfully, they were not allowed to do that.

digitalboss• 14 years ago

Dane Jasper is awesome - met him a couple times at SF Night Owls - follow him here https://twitter.com/#!/dane

citricsquid• 14 years ago

The link is to Page 2 of the article, could a mod update it to link to the first page?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/06/22/ceo-of-...

simba-hiiipower2• 14 years ago

sorry; noticed that right after i posted.. if someone could update it that would be great.

rogerbinns5• 14 years ago

My gripe with Sonic is they pull stunts on the telephony just like the scumbags such as AT&T. In my case they will not supply DSL without also supplying phone service, for which I have absolutely no use. I don't even have a physical phone to plug in and haven't for years.

They claim the phone service is "free", but you get nailed with various taxes and fees. The taxes are a legal requirement. The fees are entirely up to Sonic, although some have regulatory maximums. And Sonic charges those maximums - something AT&T doesn't!

If they were honest they wouldn't hide things like this, pretending something is free when it clearly isn't.

Josh2600hz2• 14 years ago

How do you deliver DSL without a phone line in the US?

Even AT&T delivers a phone line on their "direct DSL", they just hide the costs of regulation in the rate.

This, to me, isn't a case where sonic is to blame. This has more to do with restrictive FCC requirements than it does with Dane.

Phones are due for a regulatory rework.

gcb3• 14 years ago

You are wrong. After getting a special number ( 1-800-288-2020) i was able to order dsl from att without a landline contract and phone taxes from California. Nothing.

Catch is, the advertised price of $25/mo for 6mbps only last one year, and you have to sign up for two years, paying $55/mo on the second.

Still beats paying $40 all around for the crappy cable latency i get here (at One block from the att repeater building!)

function_seven• 14 years ago

DSL and dial-tone are completely separate services, that only share a copper line. Verizon doesn't require you to purchase dial-tone in order to get DSL. The only reason I can think of for AT&T to do so is to prop up their telephone business.

timaelliott• 14 years ago

So, basically, your gripe is their billing contains line-item entries towards phone service. If they were to simply not show you these and instead have: "DSL Service: $40. Taxes & Fees: $7.99" you would be happy?

The same provisioning taxes & fees apply to the phone line itself, regardless of your usage. Sonic doesn't own the telephone line itself. AT&T or whomever does. And you can be sure they aren't letting Sonic use those lines for free.

rogerbinns5• 14 years ago

My gripe is that I want DSL only. They say this:

DSL service: $40

Phone service: Free

Actual bill comes in:

DSL service: $40

Phone service taxes: $3

Phone service fees, surcharges etc, discretionary, levied by Sonic whose entire proceeds go back to them: $12

ie the "Free" phone service I do not want and do not use costs an extra 30%. If they were honest they would say this:

DSL service: $40

Mandatory phone service: $12 (no additional usage charges)

Mandatory taxes: $3

iandanforth2• 14 years ago

Yes.

I've always been fascinated by the 'show me the tax' mindset. I'm probably in the minority but an all inclusive, up front pricing structure will always make me happier than one that has a base + taxes + fees.

I have no illusions of being able to convince you that one pricing structure is 'better' than another. But there are a lot of us out there who really don't want to know about all the components of the price.

sharkweek• 14 years ago

I think this is a great idea, but I'm curious... -- so I'm playing devil's advocate with this question -- Couldn't there be some risk that it would be tough to build a case against someone involved in illegal activity? Like how much harder is it to build a case against CP offenses with only access to two weeks of logs?

poink• 14 years ago

There's no way to answer that question broadly, since it depends on which other sources of information law enforcement can consult in a given case.

For what it's worth, unless you retain data forever, it's always possible to delete it the day before you need it.

eridius• 14 years ago

I really wish I could use Sonic.net (for my home). Unfortunately (up to) 20MBps is just not good enough.

dfischer2• 14 years ago

I wish we had Sonic in SoCal. Only option is basically Comcast and they fucking suck.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

Don't be too jealous, I'm in Mountain View and despite being a few blocks away from Google I have the same options. It's baffling.

Only SF realistically has Sonic available to them. Supposedly some backwater in Central Valley has it too.

dmckeon• 14 years ago

In theory, they can serve most of the state: http://www.sonic.net/sales/maps/ but in practice, DSL distance limits apply. I would expect most densely populated areas of the northern SF bay counties, most especially the Santa Rosa area to be well served. OTOH, the 805(SLO) & 661(Bfd) area codes appear to be lagging.

jrockway• 14 years ago

Most people I know in Mountain View have the Comcast Business internet connection, which is basically a different company from Comcast. (Different customer service, different billing, different equipment, etc.) Apparently you can even negotiate the rate down to $75 a month, which is a lot less than I pay for Time Warner's "we are a monopoly so fuck you with a stick" package in Brooklyn.

sdfjkl• 14 years ago

UK equivalent: http://aa.net.uk/

"We have no so called black boxes to covertly monitor traffic and/or pass traffic monitoring to the authorities or anyone else. Obviously the law is such that we may have to add such black boxes, but we would resist as far as possible. We may even find we are not allowed to change this web page if ever that happens. However, I, as director, am happy to answer direct questions on this matter on irc (user RevK) or on usenet and you can get paranoid if I refuse to." -- http://aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html

VonGuard• 14 years ago

Switching this week. Bye bye Megapath/Speakeasy.

lawnchair_larry• 14 years ago

It's worth noting that due to the PATRIOT Act, they do not delete your logs after 2 weeks if they receive a NSL. NSLs include a gag order, so you will never know if they stop deleting your logs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter

The feds issue hundreds of thousands of these, and they require no warrant or judicial oversight.

NSLs can not only be issued to individuals under investigation, but "communities of interest" - so basically the social network of anyone under investigation.

nextstep• 14 years ago

Can anyone give a recommendation if my ISP choices are Webpass and Sonic.net?

awolf• 14 years ago

We have sonic.net in San Francisco. Unfortunately the speeds in our neighborhood (Haight Ashbury) are dismal. 7.5 Mbits/s, for the premium service. $90 /month.

I love the ethos of the company, but we're suffering here and will be switching soon.

Sonic.net CEO: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your ISP Should, Too.

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