Home Office Responds To European Commission Internet Privacy And Phorm Questions

In December the home office missed an important deadline from the European Commission to answer questions regarding legal concerns over internet and ISP privacy issues. It has become known that the government has now responded to these concerns with a letter sent out on the 18^th January.

It appears the government was given an extension on the deadline and avoided any further action as the European Commission had threatened before the December deadline was missed. At this time the government is refusing to provide any information as to what was contained in the reply

In October last year the European commission started the second stage of their investigation into the UK focusing on a lack of internet privacy and data protection. Interest in this area was started by the controversy surrounding Phorm and the potential misuse of deep packet inspection technology. This together with BT?s secret trials of similar technologies on their customers meant that the issues were bought to the EC?s attention.

The controversy surrounding Phorm first appeared in 2008 after it emerged that BT had been running two trials of the technology without their customer?s knowledge. This began a lengthily battle against Phorm from a number of different groups who believed its methods were an abuse of private data with many people comparing it to spyware.

Phorm had been working with a number of UK ISPs before the controversy including TalkTalk, Virgin Media and BT however all of its major backers in the UK pulled out following the bad press.

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