Phorm - Proposed Advertisement Service - Reaction - BT Trials

BT Trials

After initial denials, BT Group confirmed they ran a small scale trial, at one exchange, of a "prototype advertising platform" in 2007. The trial involved tens of thousands of end users. BT customers will be able to opt out of the trial—BT said they are developing an improved, non-cookie based opt-out of Phorm—but no decision has been made as to their post-trial approach.

The Register reported that BT ran an earlier secret trial in 2006, in which it intercepted and profiled the web browsing of 18,000 of its broadband customers. The technical report states that customers who participated in the trial were not made aware of the profiling, as one of the aims of the validation was not to affect their experience.

On 4 June 2008, a copy of a 52 page report allegedly from inside BT, titled "PageSense External Technical Validation", was uploaded to Wikileaks, a site that hosts anonymously-submitted sensitive documents. The report angered many members of the public; there are questions regarding the involvement of charity ads for Oxfam, Make Trade Fair and SOS Children's Villages, and whether or not they were made aware that their ads were being used in what many feel were highly illegal technical trials.

FIPR's Nicholas Bohm has said that trials of an online ad system carried out by BT involving more than 30,000 of its customers were potentially illegal.

BT's third trial of Phorm's Webwise system repeatedly slipped. The trial was to last for approximately two weeks on 10,000 subscribers, and was originally due to start in March 2008, then pushed to April and again to the end of May; it has yet to occur. The company is facing legal action over trials of Phorm that were carried out without user consent.

On 2 September 2008, while investigating a complaint made by anti-Phorm protestors, the City of London Police met with BT representatives to informally question them about the secret Phorm trials. On 25 September the Police announced that there will be no formal investigation of BT over its secret trials of Phorm in 2006 and 2007. According to Alex Hanff, the police said there was no criminal intent on behalf of BT and there was implied consent because the service was going to benefit customers. Bohm said of that police response:

Saying that BT customers gave implied consent is absurd. There was never any behaviour by BT customers that could be interpreted as implied consent because they were deliberately kept in the dark. As for the issue of whether there was criminal intent, well, they intended to intercept communications. That was the purpose of what they were doing. To say that there was no criminal intent is to misunderstand the legal requirements for criminal intent.

On 29 September 2008, it was announced in BT's support forum that their trial of Phorm's Webwise system would commence the following day. BT press officer Adam Liversage stated that BT is still working on a network-level opt-out, but that it will not be offered during the trial. Opted-out traffic will pass through the Webwise system but will not be mirrored or profiled. The final full roll-out of Webwise across BT's national network will not necessarily depend the completion of the work either.

Civil liberties campaigners The Open Rights Group urged BT's customers not to participate in the BT Webwise trials, saying their "anti-fraud" feature is unlikely to have advantages over features already built into web browsers.

Subscribers to BT forums had used the Beta forums to criticise and raise concerns about BT's implementation of Phorm, but BT responded with a statement:

Our broadband support forums are designed to be a place where customers can discuss technical support issues and offer solutions. To ensure that the forums remain constructive we're tightening up our moderation policies and will be deleting threads that don't provide constructive support. For example, we have removed a number of forum discussions about BT Webwise. If you do want to find out more about BT Webwise, we provide lots of information and the facility to contact us at www.bt.com/webwise. We hope you'll continue to enjoy being part of the support community.

According to Kent Ertugrul, BT would have completed the rollout of its software by the end of 2009. The Wall Street Journal, however, reported in July 2009 that BT had no plans to do so by then, and was concentrating on "other opportunities". Phorm's share price fell 40% on the news.

On July 6, 2009 BT's former chief press officer, Adam Liversage, described his thoughts using Twitter: "A year of the most intensive, personal-reputation-destroying PR trench warfare all comes to nothing...". He ended his comment with "Phantastic"

In October 2009, Sergeant Mike Reed of the City of London Police answered a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. He confirmed the crime reference number as 5253/08. In his response, he stated that after originally passing case papers to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in December 2008, the police were 'asked to provide further evidence, by the CPS in October 2009.' Asked to 'Disclose the date when that investigation was reopened' he said that it was 'On instruction of the CPS in October 2009.' In Sergeant Reed's response he named the officer in charge as 'D/S Murray'.

On 25 February 2010, it was reported that the CPS continued to work on a potential criminal case against BT over its secret trials of Phorm's system. Prosecutors considered whether or not to press criminal charges against unnamed individuals under Part I of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

It was not until April 2011 the CPS decided not to prosecute as it would not be in the public interest, stating that neither Phorm nor BT had acted in bad faith and any penalty imposed would be nominal.

In April 2012, reports said that an officer of the City of London Police had been taken to lunch by Phorm. A police spokesperson was quoted as saying they were aware of the allegation, and that while no formal complaint had been received, "The force is reviewing the information available to it before deciding the best course of action." The spokesperson also highlighted that, "City of London Police were not involved in an investigation into BT Phorm and that the decision not to investigate was prompted by CPS advice".

Read more about this topic:  Phorm, Proposed Advertisement Service, Reaction

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