Quote:
Originally Posted by KIOWA69
Well from what I read on this earlier today there is two things in question,
1) are they spying on people to know if they are truly tethering or
2) are they guessing that people are tethering based on how much data they are using compared to how much they have used in the past and trying to scare a person into either signing up for the tethering plan or scare them into stopping.
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It depends on what you mean by "spying". If you mean they are analyzing the data sent and received by your phone, then most certainly that's what they are doing. It's trivial for them to determine that you're tethering based on your internet traffic. For example, are automatic updates enabled for Windows on your laptop? As soon as it pings Microsoft's server to see if there are new updates then it is apparent you are tethering. Same goes for every antivirus program, browsers like Firefox and Chrome, and any of thousands of other Windows programs (flash, java, etc) that check for updates. There are certain URLs your phone would never be visiting that a Windows (or OSX) machine would hit on a daily basis.
Also your web browser reports the user-agent string every single time you visit a web page that indicates what type of system, browser, etc, you are running. And that is just the blatantly obvious stuff.
Is it possible to manage all of those things? Certainly, if you're very, very thorough, and ideally start with a stripped down system. But then there would be more subtle things that you cannot control. For example, if you visit a website from a laptop, it will process the data and request all the resources (individual images, etc) on that page very, very fast, and all in parallel. The browser built in your phone will process much slower. Try it. Pull up a page on your tethered laptop, then pull up the exact same page in IE or Opera on your TP2. You'll see your laptop loaded much faster even though the data rate is exactly the same. If your phone is requesting data from websites faster than your model phone can process it, then they would also know you are tethering. Now I really doubt they go that far - there is plenty of low-hanging fruit, since probably 99% of tethered laptops are flat-out reporting that they are a Windows machine every time you access a page via the user-agent string. But my point is if they get clever, then it would be much more difficult to hide the fact that you are tethering.