Virgin Media does Deep package inspection, true or false?

I was looking into whether I need to get a VPN or some other privacy protection.
I already have BTGuard for many years, just the torrent anonymiser, so I look like I'm in Canada.

Noticed that they offer free protection against "deep packet inspection" to existing customers. This allows the ISP to intercept communication over Sock5, which is actually already encrypted I believe. But appearently it can be intercepted at the ISP.

I was rather shocked to discover that it seems VM is doing this!
Virgin to Start Deep Packet Inspection (from 2009)

Sure, they say that it's only to get stats, and that's probably true, or at least it was at the time they wrote it. But I don't want them spying on me regardless!

Who knows what they'll spy on next?! Just some "stats" on what people are writing about in their emails... or what political sites the visit...? It's creepy even if I realise I am being rather paranoid here, lol.

Anyway - can anyone confirm for sure whether this is happening? I.e. Deep Package inspection?

And has anyone been harrassed by VM because of torrent usage, or anything copyright related?

I am not even a big pirate, I should say - just an online privacy freak. As a girl, my internet usage is probably more innocent than most people's, but this is a bit of a fixation with me.

Any tips appreciated!

Edited by mandarinka (Sun 25-Nov-12 14:28:35)

If you are worried about your ISP looking at your data, then consider this, why would they target you out of their 4 million customers?

You can do things like use VPN and other tools, but do you trust the end points?

Yes VM use Deep Packet Inspection.

Pretty much every ISP do for various reasons, be it simply collecting statistics on what protocols are traversing their networks or shaping traffic.

Socks5 doesn't have anything in it to encrypt traffic, you have to put encryption on top of Socks5 separately.

ISPs are perfectly permitted to look at the protocols people are running on their network, they are not permitted to dip into the contents of your email and web traffic.

The only way to keep privacy online is to not go online. Even if you're hiding from your own ISP there's zero guarantee that the place your VPN terminates aren't holding records on you and of course they get all your traffic complete with the details you used when you signed up to them.