ISPs Spying on Us: Bad Phorm

Sunday, 27 April 2008

Three of the UK’s biggest ISPs (Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk) have decided to sell your private browsing history to an advertising broker named Phorm.

This means that the entire list of every web page you visit gets sent to Phorm in real time, as you click, so they can send you what they delightfully call 'targeted advertising'. If you use webmail they can see your mail as well. It’s not just which pages you view but the content too. The only pages that they can’t see are those which are encrypted.

Now this seems to me to be spying on a grand scale and it has a lot of people very, very unhappy.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee , credited with inventing the web, said recently in an interview with the BBC that ISPs should behave like any other utility company. "I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house," he added.

"It supplies connectivity with no strings attached. My ISP doesn't control which websites I go to, it doesn't monitor which websites I go to."

It is another symptom of some ISPs attempting to monetise their customers at every opportunity and to me it stinks. Not only that but it opens us up to more security threats.

There are blogs dedicated to attempts to fight off this privacy threat: denyphorm.blogspot.com and www.badphorm.co.uk being two of the most infomative.

TalkTalk has backed off a and says that it will be an opt-in scheme. BT has an interesting spin saying that it is to increase security, which isn't what the game is about at all.

Of course if you want an ISP that Sir Tim Berners-Lee would like contact me .

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