Internet monitoring: ethical?

[igotrhythm]

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here.

A certain amount of monitoring is essential for internet service providers to cover their asses. If they see someone is using their services to perform illegal activities (torrenting copyrighted material being the most obvious example), then they are on the front lines to stop it and deny future service to the customer, as well as hand over records of the illegal activity to the authorities as evidence. They provide an important service to their customers, and as such the ISP companies have a responsibility to ensure that their customers use their services in accordance with their end user license agreements. (Even though no end-user actually takes the time to read them since it's in so much legalese.)

So let's take this tack: Any amount of monitoring is a bad thing. If so, then we can't have our browser remember our password--that's a security risk! We can't have Google suggesting things for us as that uses tracking cookies. We can't have Facebook suggesting people to add to our friends list and pages to follow because it sees what we're interested in and comes up with others along similar lines. We can't even have FFR remember what our favorite settings are--again, cookies.

So you see, a certain amount of tracking is necessary and useful to the smooth functioning of a person's relationship with the Internet. There does, of course, come a point where tracking gets excessive and invasive, and this is where I think the trouble starts with ethical, moral and legal arguments over where exactly that border should exist.