Back in November, NebuAD and several of the ISPs who were doing business with them (Embarq, WOW, Centurytel and Cable One) were sued over their plan to sell subscriber browsing histories without giving customers a functional opt-out mechanism. As we've stated in the past, NebuAD's system opted users out of receiving the system's targeted ads, but it didn't opt them out of data collection and sales. In some instances, the only notification users got was slight variations in their terms of service fine print.

Now a less well known company with a similar business model named Adzilla is facing a similar lawsuit in California, along with sixteen unnamed "John Doe" ISPs. Like NebuAD, Adzilla paid ISPs to install deep packet inspection hardware on their network to track which websites users visited (and for how long). Adzilla quietly stopped doing business in the U.S. last fall after the public debate over NebuAD bubbled over.

In the NebuAD suit, the ISPs involved are playing dumb, insisting they're legally innocent because it was NebuAD that was intercepting user traffic.