A new threat is emerging to the privacy of people using the biggest three internet service providers in the country, Virgin Media (formerly NTL), BT and TalkTalk.  They have all signed up with a company called “Phorm” which monitors net use so that it can send you adverts on web pages that it thinks you will be interested in.

It’s starting to become clear that BT have been engaged in secret tests of this system as early as last year, and plans to roll it out to thousands of customers over the coming months in a larger scale trial.

Information about this first crossed my desktop in February with this report from the Register – but although I’m fairly technically minded, the image there is too complicated for me to get much of the problem.

Thankfully there is a comprehensive translation on the website of a pressure group, BadPhorm, which summarizes the problem thus:

So, what’s all the fuss about?

Simply put, three of the UK’s largest ISPs (Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk) have decided to sell your private browsing history to an advertising broker. Yes, the entire list of every web page you visit gets sent to Phorm (the broker) in real time, as you click, so they can send you ‘targeted advertising’. Naturally the ISP’s are not too keen on telling their users this, they’d much rather feed us all platitudes about how it’ll help combat phishing and how the targeted adverts will be so much better than the random ones we see today. In fact, they didn’t even announce it to the UK press, we had to find out about it from the New York Times!

That easy-to-read translation seems to have done the trick, and it’s starting to engage politicians, including Lib Dem Shadow DCMS minister Don Foster who has written to the chairman of BT specifically about the covert trials of the system last year. He is also planning a Early Day Motion on the subject which you can read here, along with a full report from The Register.

As a part of the team here at LDV – a website presently wholly supported by advertising – I’m slightly reluctant to admit that on my web browser Firefox, I have installed a very effective plugin called Adblock, which I use in conjunction with Filterset.G, which means I haven’t actually seen an advert on a website for years.  Except of course on LDV when I have expressly turned them on again. And even then, although I’m not seeing the ads myself, my ISP is still sharing my browsing habits with Phorm.