Airtel has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently, but the latest accusation being made against the company are pretty scary and highly unethical in nature.

The company is apparently injecting Javascripts and iframes into web browsers in an attempt to alter the browsing experience. The anomaly was reported by Thejesh GN who has published his findings on GitHub.

Update: Since publishing this article, Airtel has released a statement saying it’s building a tool to allow broadband users to track the amount of data they’ve consumed.

According to Thejesh GN, the iframe tries to insert a toolbar into the browsing experience and that the parent URL of both the iframe and Javascript belongs to Bharti Airtel Bangalore.

Airtel on the other hand, says that it is developing technology to enable users to keep a check on the MBs of data consumed during every uninterrupted browsing session. It says the move was driven by non-mobile consumers demand for easily tracking data usage while using surfing the web.

“Our customers have frequently asked us for ways of easily keeping a track of their data consumption – specifically dongle and broadband users, who unlike mobile users, cannot receive real-time alerts on their usage,” read the company’s statement.

Mining user data has become big business, and the more sensitive the data, the bigger the prize. It’s highly unethical for an ISP to carry out such programs, but it isn’t unheard of. Moreover, it’s to be seen how the Internet reacts to Airtel’s statement now that we have both sides of the story.