p2pnet news view Freedom | Advertising:- “The news that BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media are to sell their customers private browsing data to a firm called Phorm is attracting a lot of attention on the internet,” said Eclectica in March, particularly since Phorm, “before it renamed itself, was the notorious spyware firm 121Media. The deal will affect 10 million internet users.”

It did indeed attract a lot of comment, and continues to do so.

In contrast, “the BBC has not mentioned the scandal at all,” said the post, going on »»»

Despite it being a far bigger story that will affect far more people than the recent data losses by government departments. The Phorm story was actually broken by the New York Times.

Is the BBC technology correspondent asleep on the job? Has somebody in the BBC been ‘lunched’ by a PR firm? Don’t the BBC care about privacy.

Maybe, but the Beeb woke up five days later with a Q&A on the subject, ultimately responding to a WhatDoTheyKnow Freedom of Information Act request on whether or not they intended to Opt-Out of Phorm’s WebWise.

Phorm is all about DPI — Deep Privacy Invasion, or Deep Packet Inspection, depending on where you sit, said p2pnet recently, noting, “It’s a complicated way of using DPI to snag personal and private information for re-use  in behavioural targeting, a coy phrase employed by advertising companies.”

We went on to quote Bad Idea as pointing out »»»

Sir Tim Berners Lee, the man who founded the world wide web, who told the BBC in March, I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that`s not going to get to my insurance company and I`m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5%.

Apart from the legal issue of privacy infringement, Berners Lee also pointed out that there`s also the question of Phorm`s collection of cookie data from web browsers, which is arguably theft; If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I`m getting in return.

Back to Phorm and the BBC, “The response included a substantial collection of internal communications between various BBC staff and departments – and the feeling is generally that Phorm is bad and they need to find a way to publicly Opt-Out, but they have a number of concerns,” says Phorm nemesis Alex Hanff on NoDPI, continuing »»»

Their primary concern seems to be their contract between Audience Science and BBC World Wide and this crops up a number of times in the various discussions.  It would seem the BBC don`t want to appear to be hypocrites over Phorm when they themselves are using Audience Science for their global web sites to do their own behavioural profiling.

I think it is important to remind people at this point that it was the action of NoDPI campaigners which originally forced the BBC to remove Audience Science from the UK BBC sites and restrict it to only their global services – and that this alone should be enough to dissolve the BBC`s concerns on how the public will perceive Audience Science.

If they felt it was fitting to remove Audience Science from the bbc.co.uk web sites, the same argument goes with regards to opting out of Phorm.

Other concerns are raised regarding the BBC`s contentious relationship with ISPs regarding BBC iPlayer.  For some time ISPs such as BT have been complaining that they should receive a cut of the BBC`s funding for carrying BBC iPlayer traffic on their networks as this is allegedly causing significant strain on their resources.  It would seem from the data now at hand that the BBC are concerned that if they Opt-Out of Phorm, ISPs will accuse them of not only costing them more with iPlayer and iPlayer HD, but also now preventing them from obtaining revenues through advertising by blocking access to Phorm.

Clearly there are several people within the BBC who fully understand how Phorm`s WebWise works (as well as a couple who have illustrated they haven`t got a clue) and generally the feeling is that Phorm is bad and that inevitably Phorm will fold under public pressure.

It seems that the only justification the BBC have offered themselves for not opting out of WebWise are those of protecting their own interests as opposed to protecting the interests of the general public, and this is a tragedy.

The BBC should simply do what is the right thing to do (as illustrated in the FOI request documents) and that is to Opt-Out of allowing Phorm to profile their web users activities.

Quite aside from the privacy concerns, the BBC charter states that the BBC must make their decisions after considering how those decisions will impact the market and public, particularly with regards to innovation and competition.

For the BBC to allow Phorm to profile their users activities, the BBC will be allowing Phorm unprecedented access not only to web behaviour but also to viewing habits (via iPlayer usage), political and religious opinion (via news) and a whole host of other sensitive data which can be inferred from the BBC services the general public choose to use on a day to day basis. This is incredibly dangerous and gives a single company access to a quantity of data that has never been aggregated at such a level before now.

Of all the organisations within the UK who might consider blocking Phorm`s WebWise by Opting Out – the BBC are the one organisation that should have no doubts on their position and that position should be a clear and resounding – No Phorm.  It is time the people in charge at the BBC stopped worrying about their own self image and started to represent the public who fund their services.

[The pic on the right was posted onwww.graffiti.org which is, unlike Phorm, very cool.]

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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May, 2009