UK ISPs (BT, Carphone Warehouse & VM) To Start Tracking Your Surfing To Serve You Ads

jmc777 · 19 Feb 2008 at 01:11

UK ISPs To Start Tracking Your Surfing To Serve You Ads
from the pirvacy-please dept

For years now, ISPs have been searching for alternative revenue streams to avoid just being "dumb pipes." A few years ago, they picked up on the fact that they have a tremendous amount of data about what you (yes, you!) do online. A bunch of ISPs then started selling your clickstream data to companies that could do something useful with it (though, those ISPs probably neglected to tell you they were doing this). Late last year, we heard about a company that was trying to work with ISPs to make use of that data themselves to insert their own ads based on your surfing history -- and now we've got the first report of some big ISPs moving into this realm. Over in the UK three big ISPs, BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media have announced plans to use your clickstream data to insert relevant ads as you surf through a new startup called Phorm.

While Phorm claims that it keeps your data private "by tracking individual users with an assigned number only," that's hardly assuring. After all, remember that both AOL and Netflix have released similar anonymized data where identifying info was replaced with an assigned number... and it didn't take long for both sets of data to be de-anonymized. While it's no surprise that ISPs would want to get into the advertising business, and to think that they could better target ads thanks to their knowledge of your entire surfing history, it's going to freak some people out (and potentially cause some serious privacy problems). All the more reason to figure out how encrypt your traffic and hide your activities from your ISP.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080218/024203278.shtml

Hyper · 19 Feb 2008 at 02:12

The internet is already full of ads so I dont see why this will be a problem, plus if ISP's are making more profit surely this can only be a good thing. Meaning they can increase the capacity of the network and general performance of the service.

I am all up for this!

marc2003 · 19 Feb 2008 at 02:44

Hyper said:
Meaning they can increase the capacity of the network and general performance of the service.

here's a novel idea.... how about they spend the money we pay them for our subscriptions on network capacity?

Si MPS · 19 Feb 2008 at 08:03

yeah, because that goes a LONG way......

this, however, seems a bit ridiculous to me...

PhillyDee · 19 Feb 2008 at 08:50

Great, all ill ever see adverts for might be based on boobiesboobiesboobies.com. Oh well.

Si MPS · 19 Feb 2008 at 11:36

im struggling to understand how they will force this?

in some sort of AOL dialler fashion?

afraser2k · 19 Feb 2008 at 12:10

Will the adverts be appearing in web sites that we visit? If so I can't see the site developers being too happy about this, unless of course it's just going to be on the ISP home page.

Would the advertising data also come under the Data Protection Act as well?

jmc777 · 19 Feb 2008 at 12:56

Hyper said:
The internet is already full of ads so I dont see why this will be a problem

The people supplying those ads (Google Adsense for example) don't keep track of every website you visit.

Si MPS said:
im struggling to understand how they will force this?

in some sort of AOL dialler fashion?

I'm guessing that everything's going to be routed through some kind of big, shiny, customer-loving, ad-serving proxy, which will be running Phorm's spyware.....sorry, I mean software.

You'll be opted-in by default (if you're a VM customer, not sure about the other ISPs), and you'll have to visit one of the Phorm websites (the webwise one I think) to opt-out. They place a 'do not serve ads and do not track' cookie in your browser, but your http traffic will still go through whatever the ISP has set-up at their end to handle this. And if you have more than one user on your computer, or if you use more that one browser, you'll have to opt-out for each one (and again if/when you clear your cookies).

afraser2k said:
Will the adverts be appearing in web sites that we visit? If so I can't see the site developers being too happy about this, unless of course it's just going to be on the ISP home page.

I think the ads will only show for website's that have buddied-up with Phorm. It's not the ads that worry me, it's the ISP handing a user's entire browsing history over to another company that does.

bigredshark · 19 Feb 2008 at 13:39

marc2003 said:
here's a novel idea.... how about they spend the money we pay them for our subscriptions on network capacity?

How about you actually pay enough to finance network upgrades? £25 a month ADSL makes little profit for the providers as a percentage. a relatively small upgrade we're doing right now is costing £2m, you do the maths....

tolien · 19 Feb 2008 at 16:08

im struggling to understand how they will force this?

VM cable already pushes you through a transparent proxy.

pc-modd · 19 Feb 2008 at 17:02

Hmm don't like the sound of this.

Dave85 · 19 Feb 2008 at 22:17

tolien said:
VM cable already pushes you through a transparent proxy.

Virgin Media removed the use of all transparent proxy servers in Spring 2007. Was causing to many problems

Energize · 19 Feb 2008 at 22:24

Firefox + Adblock plus + Decent ISP = no ads.

Hyper said:
if ISP's are making more profit surely this can only be a good thing.

For the shareholders not the customers....

Meaning they can increase the capacity of the network and general performance of the service.

They already can with how much they are earning now, they just choose to put it into their bank accounts instead. This extra money won't be any different.

HangTime · 20 Feb 2008 at 00:58

I haven't seen any up to date figures, but last year VM were typically making a net loss of over £100m a quarter...

Energize · 20 Feb 2008 at 01:14

HangTime said:
I haven't seen any up to date figures, but last year VM were typically making a net loss of over £100m a quarter...

Bt certainly weren't, £2.6 billion operating profit and £95 million for Carphone Warehouse.

jmc777 · 20 Feb 2008 at 02:06

A chap called Andy posted this in the virginmedia.feedback newsgroup...

Virginmedia- How safe is our personal data with Phorm?

I find it extremely worrying that the Chairman and CEO of Phorm is the
same person who founded PeopleOnPage.
http://www.phorm.com/reports/Admission_to_AIM.pdf

PeopleOnPage according to several reputable sites was responsible for
the Apropos spyware and rootkits.

http://www.f-secure.com/sw-desc/apropos.shtml
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2004-113018-3823-99

mrk · 20 Feb 2008 at 10:29

tolien said:
VM cable already pushes you through a transparent proxy.

VM stopped transparent proxies ages ago.

Proxy servers

Virgin Media previously redirected web browser traffic on port 80 through transparent proxy servers with a view to saving on bandwidth costs and improving browsing performance. This did not apply to any other form of traffic. Up to 15 proxy server addresses hosted each area[31] The use of proxy servers (generally, not specific to Virgin Media) also caused problems for websites which use less sophisticated methods to identify IP addresses to ban and/or track users. Users of Mac OS X had also experienced incompatibilities when using some sites (including myspace.com).

Virgin Media removed the use of all transparent proxy servers in Spring 2007.[32]

Edit*

Beaten!

Cavallino · 20 Feb 2008 at 10:32

Hmm...

Meh.

Dolph · 20 Feb 2008 at 10:52

Given that this is Google's entire revenue strategy, I can't see why people are getting all upset about it when someone else tries it...

willhub · 20 Feb 2008 at 10:58

Oh dear, and AOL is carphone warhouse :eek:

, hmmm so its going to be a startup entry? Surely you can disable it?