BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media broadband internet providers, faced the anger of the customers after collaborating with a pioneer in spyware technology. With nine million households between them, they signed up to software from AIM-listed business Phorm, run by US magnate Kent Ertugrul.
Monitoring what content users browse on the Net, Phorm is charging the advertisers and than delivers ads to the costumers. The money is shared with the ISP. According to Phorm, customer's identity is 'anonymised', advertisers won’t know their identity.
The IT community is concerned that the things aren’t exactly like that. They found a relevant name for the situation, 'data pimping' and badphorm.co.uk, is set up to attack the move.
Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, declared that this so called 'anonymised' technology was never efficient and ''if you care about your privacy, do not use BT, Virgin or Talk-Talk as your internet provider''.
In return, Ertugrul declared that far away from being ''the Prince of Darkness'', the people will see that they will provide ''greater privacy and fewer rubbish ads''.
In order to sustain his cause, Ertugrul gave the example of Google and other search engines that store details of websites visited or searches made and that the general category of the sites is the only information he keeps hold of.
Yet, the users are worried because the Phorm's background doesn’t give them a security feeling. They probably still remember the time when Phorm and Ertugrul, as pioneers of spyware, monitored customer's websurfing and made unwanted pop-up ads appear on screen. The 'adware', Phorm's PeopleOn-Page spyware, wasn’t easy to get rid of after infecting a PC.
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