[Ian Wall]

I hope it's not BT, Virgin Media or Talk Talk.

Like most of you that are using Virgin Media that have posted on this thread, I have found that they have de-generated from an excellent organisation in the days of Richard Branson to now, as Jimmy has stated in starting this thread, as an absolutely crap service. Their Customer Services Department is now without doubt the worst of any organisation that I have come into contact with. I am contractually ‘locked’ into them for a further month. It is whilst looking into whom to go to that I found this aspect of Internet Providers interesting and post this here to provide everyone else an insight as to what is going on.

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!

The above mentioned providers have apparently reached agreement with Phorm to sell your surfing destinations to enable them to target advertising more specifically at you. Bear in mind, a lot of the smaller ISPs actually use the services of these big three although there is not necessarily any obvious connection! This is an interesting opening link:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02...a_summer_2007/

The company mentioned Phorm have gone through several name changes in their time - not surprisingly since they apparently have their roots in spyware.

Additionally BT customers, beware. The ‘sanitised’ name for this Phorm program is Webwise. They very craftily tie it up with a so called security features.

There is a thread currently running on a BT support forum:

http://www.beta.bt.com/bta/forums/th...art=0&tstart=0

where this is being debated. It is very much upto date and the BT staff do contribute. However if you were to read through it, and unfortunately it's over 20 pages long, you'll find that the staff have been frequently contradicting one another and Phorm employees contradicting them. Staff have been caught out lying in the thread too. It appears that BT has been less than honest about the whole matter.

The obvious solution to all the concerns being aired there is "find another ISP", that are categorically prepared to state that they have no intention of incorporating Phorm, or Webwise. However, as was pointed out on the BT website, various other smaller ISPs are actually owned by BT. Although it would appear that they have managerial independence at present, but for how long?

Make no mistake, even if you have logged in to oOple, any posts you make here are on an unencrypted (non-HTTPS) page and would be included in the profiler, as would any mail you checked via web-mail.

Also, do not be satisfied if you are told that you can opt-out of this scheme if you want to. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter if you opt-in or opt-out. The system only appears to check for the presence of the opt-out cookie *after* your browser request has gone through the profiler. So all you actually opt-out of are the targeted ads. Phorm still get the marketing data.


Useful informative information about all of this can be obtained from this link:
http://www.badphorm.co.uk:80/page.php?2

The closest real world analogy to what all these ISPs are doing is having your postman open all your mail, read it through for keywords and seal it back up so he can better target you with more relevant junk mail. Obviously totally unacceptable

I’m a nonconPhormist and I will not be conned by Phorm however its name is sanitised.
Ian