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Over a year of conversation between the United Kingdom and the European Union over the legality of the advertising service ‘Phorm’ has culminated in the EU sending a letter of formal notice asking the United Kingdom “To implement properly the EU rules ensuring…the personal data protection of citizens.”
Phorm has been around since 2003, only started hitting the headlines in the last few years. The service provides targeted advertisements to internet users. The end user name for the service is “Webwise” sharing its name with the well known and entirely unrelated BBC service. The idea is to ‘categorise’ what users are interested in and then match those users up with advertisers selling products that relate to that category. The company is working with major UK ISPs such as BT, TalkTalk and cable provider, Virgin Media. On the surface it seems harmless, but Phorm’s actions over the last few years have been anything but benign.
The service has brought up countless issues concerned with the privacy surrounding Phorms technology which uses “deep packet inspection” to harvest data. The privacy issue only got worse when Phorm partnered with BT and launched a ‘secret trial’ of the service on some 18,000 broadband consumers. This quite rightly enraged many users to the point where the police were involved, although later in the year they announced that there would be no formal investigation into BT’s secret trials.
Despite many complaints and questions to the legality of the service, the UK has yet to do anything at all about Phorm, which could potentially violate EU laws on privacy. The UK now has two months in which to respond. The issue could potentially end up in the European Court of Justice if the two parties cannot resolve the problem. The UK Department for Business and Enterprise has restated its opinion that Phorm is “capable of being operated in a lawful, appropriate and transparent manner.” The company itself has said that the news will not affect any of the company’s plans.
This seems unlikely to be the case however as Phorms online reputation plummets. Most antivirus and spyware scanners list the Phorm tracking cookie as ‘Adware’ and several major websites such as the BBC, Guardian and Financial Times have pulled out of any deals with the company. This week, online retailer Amazon has said that it will not allow the system to scan any of its web pages at all. To see such a major website deny the company access is bound to affect its usefulness.
Many of the ISPs that originally signed up with the system are now working on a variety of ‘opt-in’ or ‘opt-out’ clauses to give customers some say in whether or not they use the service. This follows a strong message last year from Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University: “If you care about your privacy, do not use BT, Virgin or Talk-Talk as your internet provider.”
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