A new revelation regarding the live testing of a customer monitoring platform by BT the largest UK ISP has caused anger and alarm.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/17/bt_phorm_lies/BT has admitted that it secretly used customer data to test Phorm's advertising targeting technology last summer, and that it covered it up when customers and The Register raised questions over the suspicious redirects.
The national telecoms provider now faces legal action from customers who are angry their web traffic was compromised.
In a statement, BT said: "We conducted a very small scale technical test of a prototype advertising platform on one exchange in June 2007. The test was specifically conducted to evaluate the functional and technical performance of the platform.
We first asked BT about its relationship with Phorm in July 2007, when it was widely known as 121Media, a firm deeply involved in spyware. BT denied any testing and said customers whose DNS requests were being redirected must have a malware problem.
As part of its admission that it lied over the 2007 trials, BT also said it will follow Carphone Warehouse's lead and develop an opt-out that does not involve cookies and means no data will be mirrored to a profiling server, even if it is ignored. It follows serious concerns raised by experts on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) that Phorm's plan to use cookies to exclude people who opt-out is illegal.
BT repeated its insistence that the technology is legal, however. It said: "We are already developing an opt-out solution that would remove the need for opt-out cookies altogether. We have carried out significant due diligence in this area, and informed consent from our customers will satisfy the necessary legal requirements."
Yet some authorities on RIPA have argued that ISPs would also need permission from website owners to profile the content of their pages. BT has not responded to our questions on this point.
This is a disgusting breach of their subsribers trust and very likely illegal under the governments recently released guidlines on this activity and almost certainly illegal under article 8 of the european convention on human rights signatory countries of which the UK is one, lets hope BT apologise and comes clean before they are torn apart by thousands of angry lawsuits.
