Comment by RajT88

> For that to be in anyway useful for those companies (as a means to spy on their competitors), they'd have to be actively looking into the information to derive intelligence. Not really practical without some serious engineering, which would leave tons of evidence. It's not worth it. That's just not how these companies operate.

Was thinking about this as well. What evidence would it realistically leave? I mean - they are sending the uri's by default so no client side reverse engineering is needed. They say plainly they are doing this.

Yes, it's a lot of traffic.

IP spaces are well known. Easy to filter for corporate traffic. From there, it's a smorgasbord of internal URI's to dig through - anything with no domain name, or host.(companyname).com traffic. Also easy.

Maybe this ends up in a big data lake queryable by certain groups, but not anyone likely to spill the beans. NDA covers you there. This is not New York Times level corporate subterfuge. It's almost certainly not legal - and this is the important thing - the regulators haven't had the gumption to prosecute anti-competitive behavior in earnest since the 70's or earlier. What Microsoft went through in the 90's in retrospect was antitrust litigation with kid gloves on.

This armchair analyst sees no downside to such practices. Risk, but so little it doesn't matter.

Sure, insiders could spill the beans and violate their NDA's, but who the fuck is going to do more than levy a slap on the wrist for something too difficult to explain to Congress in a way that gets them to care?

Now, I think if you actually put your hands on the browsing history of congressmen harvested in this way, and put it into the public domain, you're going to get a bunch of regulators to all of a sudden care about antitrust enforcement again.