Eye-O-Sauron style web intercepts.

Geekery / March 12, 2008 / John / 0

If you’re a customer of BT, Virgin, or Carphone Warehouse, the chances are you’re going to see a change in your Ts and Cs at some point this year. That’s because these ISPs are planning to contract the services of an AdWare company called Phorm to monitor every bit of web browsing you do in order to serve you with targeted ads. And it’s all apparently for your own good. More information on this unsavoury bunch of individuals can be found here.

Knowing the way ISPs tend to behave, the likelihood of getting fair treatment is fairly slim. Given that many people are tied in for 12 or 18 month contracts, you may not even be able to vote with your pocket. So, I would urge you to send an email like the following to your ISP. In fact, feel free to lift this one verbatim.

I have been following with interest BTs plans to incorporate Phorm’s targeted ad software into the BT Broadband package.

As I do not consider myself to be anyone’s “target market” and value my privacy highly, I would be grateful if BT could confirm either:

1. That opting out of the service will mean that none of my traffic will go anywhere near any hardware or software owned, operated or supplied by Phorm or their subsidiaries.

or

2. The substantial change in the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy that implementing this system will require will allow me to leave my fixed term contract early with no penalites.

John

UNIX geek, wannabe cook, musician, book-lover, and all round good-guy.