Does Comcast really not respect your privacy ?

[Zarn]

Comcast's a company. A business, if you like. They don't "respect" privacy per se. If a connection is encrypted, such as it is when you connect to your bank, then they can see data traffic to a particular site (in this case a bank site), but they won't know the contents.

Most torrents and so on aren't encrypted. They're therefore not private, and therefore quite easy to identify. Obviously, your provider knows which sites you visit. This is something mandated by law for them, so they obviously do this. There's no expectation of "privacy" in that sense.

But, as I said, if you encrypt, they can't look into the data stream - but they still know it's there.