Comcast Vows to Stop Recording Web Activity

Comcast Corp. promised amid criticism Wednesday to stop immediately recording the Web browsing activities of its 1 million high-speed Internet subscribers.

One congressional member said collecting the data might have broken federal law.

The president of Comcast’s cable communications division, Stephen Burke, said the company will stop storing the information.

Comcast also said it will hire a chief privacy officer and “will not let this situation rest until we are convinced that we have done everything that needs to be done to ensure that our customers are reassured.”

Comcast’s reversal--and inquiries from Rep. Edward Markey, (D-Mass.) an aggressive privacy advocate--came a day after The Associated Press reported that Comcast had started recording each customer’s visits to Web pages without notification. Comcast said the decision was part of a technology overhaul to save money and speed up the network and was not intended to infringe on customers’ privacy.

Comcast said the information, collected over the last six weeks, had been stored temporarily, was purged automatically every few days and “has never been connected to individual subscribers.”

Markey said the 1984 Cable Act prohibits Comcast from collecting personal information from its subscribers without obtaining “prior written or electronic consent.”