Visual Networking application raises possibility
Is Cisco spying on users? A story in U.K.’s The Inquirer states that Cisco has unveiled a bandwidth usage monitoring application designed to provide insight into what type of traffic – such as video — is using available bandwidth.
Indeed, the application, which runs on Windows Vista and XP, is involved with Cisco’s Visual Networking Index PC Pulse project. It is currently in beta, The Inquirer reports.
Cisco claims none of the information collected by the client software is personally identifiable to the user generating it. Indeed, Cisco spokeswoman Sara Cicero posted a comment to The Inquirer story reaffirming that claim:
Cisco: No Snooping Involved
To clarify our privacy policy, Cisco respects and protects every individual’s privacy and personal identity. Our applications do not collect or store any personal or identifiable information (e.g., file names, Web history, et al. This information is NOT tracked or stored by our VNI applications.)
posted by : Sara Cicero, 02 April 2010
Still, it might be disconcerting to employees of a company running the software to realize that how they use their available bandwidth might be viewed by Cisco – and then shared with their employer. Ditto for the casual at-home user surfing highly personal Web waters through a Cisco/Linksys/Valet router.
On the other hand, it might also be a deterrent to those users from straying too far outside the company firewall.
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