This is how <i>all</i> network security appliances work.<p>All IDS or IPS appliances do this. Running something open source like Snort or Suricata? It&#x27;s &quot;MitMing&quot; you, too. (More accurately &quot;Man-on-the-Side&#x27;ing&quot; for most installations, since they&#x27;re typically IDS and not IPS, but I&#x27;m just using the same alarmist term you did to make my point.)<p>All &quot;smart firewalls&quot; (sometimes dubbed &quot;nextgen firewalls&quot; by marketing departments) do this. If your network uses firewalls from Palo Alto, that firewall is doing nearly the exact same things as this Fidelis appliance. Either most of the same features, or all of the same if you pay a little extra.<p>All proxies do this, except only for 80&#x2F;443.<p>All host IDS agents do this as well.<p>&gt;(and is already done, indirectly and efficiently by chrome for instance)<p>Chrome isn&#x27;t going to detect your machine beaconing out via malware that&#x27;s already installed. Chrome just has lists of bad URLs and URL paths. Chrome&#x27;s security features certainly provide another useful layer of protection, but is not nearly sufficient as a malware or intrusion detection system by itself.<p>This article is FUD, in my opinion, for singling out just this specific appliance as if it&#x27;s somehow more invasive than all the other gear on a typical large network. If you want to make an article about how packet inspection is bad in general, go ahead, but I think that war has been lost. If you&#x27;re using someone else&#x27;s network and computers, I don&#x27;t think you should have a problem with a device checking the packets your computer sends and receives to see if they match specific regex or byte patterns.<p>It&#x27;s true that a proprietary appliance is going to be a bit more blackbox with exactly how it processes traffic, compared to an open source solution, but often the signature lists themselves are accessible and configurable by the customer. Sometimes the actual signature content is visible as well.<p>Systems like these are absolutely necessary to help prevent breaches, as long as there are competent internal employees who can make full use of them. Perhaps an open source system will be a little bit better privacy-wise, on the off chance the proprietary solution you&#x27;re using is secretly doing something malicious or sending sensitive traffic elsewhere on the Internet, though if it were, the scandal would likely greatly harm or ruin the company.