06 June 2008

BT face protest over Phorm

Rob Stringer

Opponents of Phorm, a controversial system which monitors websites visited in order to display user-specific adverts, are to hold a protest during BT's annual general meeting in July.

Protest organiser, Alex Hanff, states that "By presenting the Metropolitan Police with a full case file including supporting evidence and witness statements we are hoping that the victims of the covert trials will finally see justice through the prosecution of BT."

BT has previously been under fire from a computer security researcher for trialing the targeted advertising without the consent of users.

Dr Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge insisted the Phorm system is ‘against the law of the land’.

BT ran trials of the Webwise system in 2006 and 2007. In the first year, in what was described by BT as a ‘small-scale technical test’, almost 19m web-pages were intercepted, without the knowledge of users.

BT claim that the system is completely anonymous, and that no information gathered from the initial trials was stored or processed.

Kent Entrugel, chairman of Phorm, insisted that the system was a ‘privacy-enhancing tool, not the opposite’. According to Entrugel, and link with the user’s personal information, such as their IP address, is destroyed.

The latest trial, which hopes to monitor 10 000 broadband users, will invite users to be monitored using a cookie which asks if they wish to ‘opt-out’.

The test is being closely watched by the ICO (Information Commissioners Office.)

"We believe that it is only by allowing their technology to be subject to detailed scrutiny by independent technical experts that they will be able to prove their assertions regarding privacy," commented a spokesperson for the ICO.

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