Longrider

Courtesy of the Spy Blog, a little scam I had missed.

The Register has published some diagrams of how the appalling Phorm web advertising scheme will work, Major UK broadband Internet Service Providers British Telecom Retail, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse TalkTalk, all seem to have signed a “commercial suicide pact” contract, to abuse their customer’s data privacy, without first obtaining their prior informed consent.

The essence of this little scheme is that the ISPs in question sell the right to tap into their customers’ web browsing activities directly so that the user may be subjected to targeted advertising.

Phorm appears to be a combination of these two direct marketing approaches , except this time it is inflicted on all the web traffic of the unlucky customers of the participating ISPs, via man-in-the-middle attack hardware plugged into their core network infrastructure.

There are flaws in the reasoning – quite apart from the ethics. The person browsing may not be the regular user of the computer and the regular user may be browsing on behalf of someone else. I regularly get requests from my sister asking me to look things up for her – and it is none of the ISP’s business. And, I absolutely detest advertising shoved in my face. What is it with these people? Did they not notice the backlash against pop-up ads? It wasn’t just the popping up that pissed people off. Most of us simply don’t want to be subjected to a sales pitch when we are browsing. Something Spyblog reiterates:

Phorm perpetuate the common misconception amongst advertising weasels, that if your web browser software connects with a particular website, at any time, then that somehow means that you as a person, are positively and genuinely interested in receiving direct advertising related to the vague subject category in which they have arbitrarily categorised that website.

Then, of course, there’s the ethics. Are people being asked to opt-in or are the ISPs going for the lazy option; opt-out? This, from BT’s website:

I didn’t switch on this service. Why do I have to switch it off?

We believe BT Webwise is an important improvement to your online experience — giving you better protection against online fraud and giving you more relevant advertising.

We realise that you may not want to use the free service, so we’ve made it quick and easy to switch on and off.

The lazy option it is, then.

The Spyblog goes on to consider the legal implications of such information gathering:

Since many people use web based email systems, for example, these ISPs and Phorm should be prosecuted for illegal interception of communications without a warrant signed by the Home Secretary under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 section 1 Unlawful interception, and each of the people responsible should be facing up to 2 years in prison, including those who seem to have already conducted full scale pilot trials of this technology on unsuspecting BT customers.

It seems these days every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to poke about in our personal lives for their own grubby ends. Fortunately, I don’t use any of the iSPs in question and have no plans to.

The Register is suitably scathing:

We tapped Aaron Crane, The Register’s Technical Overlord, for help bending our puny scribe’s brain around these diagrams. He said: “Looking at this makes me damn glad my own internet connection is funded by what I pay for it, so the ISP doesn’t have to engage in this sort of shady practice merely to cover costs.”

“If I were using one of the ISPs concerned, I’d switch.”

So would I and I’d make damn sure the ISP knew why.

There’s more info on Bad Phorm.

One final thought; if the ISPs concerned weren’t aware that what they are doing is at best unethical and at worst, illegal, would they have not trumpeted it from the rooftops, announced it with press releases and such? That they didn’t speaks volumes. They are behaving badly – and they know it. But, never mind, sneak it in under the radar and sell their customers’ privacy before they notice – that’ll do the trick.