[clug] OT: Choice Honesty Box

[Andrew Steele]

I received an email from Choice today offering me one of their honesty
boxes.

https://www.honestybox.com.au/

>From what I can tell, Choice are trying to gather a big dataset of ISP
performance (a good thing), and to do so they are inviting people to put a
device on their home network (not such a good thing) which runs periodic
tests on network performance and collects the data centrally.

There's little in the way of technical details on Choice's site.

>From what I can tell, it "seems" safe:  plug a device into one of your
router switch ports and does the rest.  They say it doesn't monitor traffic.

After a bit of digging I found some useful info here:

https://www.choice.com.au/electronics-and-technology/internet/connecting-to-the-internet/articles/broadband-provider-performance-measuring-program-faq

Including this FAQ:

Can you spy on my internet use?

No, the Honesty Boxes are designed to simulate a computer connected to the
internet and has no network traffic pass through, and no bridging network
traffic ports. Nor do they have any local network traffic measuring
capability. That means that your privacy is maintained throughout the life
of the program.
Gathering metrics to improve overall Internet performance seems like a good
thing.  But there obviously a tension with how and what data is gathered.

I'm interested in the opinion of others about this device.  Has anyone
already installed one?

Thanks
Andrew