Hardly deserves a medal. News.com: Comcast to stop storing Web users' data [via Tomalak's Realm] Next up: Comcast executives to stop beating their wives. Alert Ted Koppel. [diveintomark]

As far as I've been able to see, what happened was that Comcast decided to set up a network of transparent web proxies. This is a good thing, IMHO - next time there's a big world tragedy, all the Comcast customers will hit the caches instead of the CNN front page, and there'll be a few thousand fewer people bringing the net to its knees during emergencies.

I've only dealt with two proxy servers before, Microsoft Proxy Server, and Squid. Both of them kept, in their default configuration, detailed logs in the same way that Webservers keep detailed logs. IP address. What was being requested. What was the response. You can get packages that analyse Squid proxy logs so you can see what your ratio of cache hits to misses are, and so on.

It looks like all that happened was the sysadmins who were installing the servers knew about the logs but didn't think about the privacy, this was just business as usual, the default configuration. Someone else knew what proxy servers generally logged, and kicked up a stink. Comcast said "Well, it's accepted industry practice, and the logs can be useful", and then stopped logging.

Where's the big deal?