BT shelves Phorm's Web usage monitoring for ads

British telecommunications provider BT PLC is indefinitely shelving plans to target online advertising to individual customers by using Web monitoring techniques that have drawn privacy complaints.

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The share price of controversial behavioural targeting firm Phorm fallen by more than 20% in early trading today, after the Office of Fair Trading announced an investigation into how the habits and personal information of web users are used to target internet advertising.

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Shares in the online ad firm Phorm have fallen by more than 40% after BT said it had no immediate plans to use the service that tracks online behaviour.

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The Home Office has been accused of colluding with online ad firm Phorm on "informal guidance" to the public on whether the company's service is legal.

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BT has banned all future discussion of Phorm and its "WebWise" targeted advertising product on its customer forums, and deleted all past threads about the controversy dating back to February.

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Telecoms giant BT is about to start further trials of a controversial internet advertising technology. Developed by Phorm, the Webwise system watches what people do online and shows adverts tuned to their interests.

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Just what we need: another way to get bombarded with personalized ads.

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ISPs playing ISPy

How would you feel if your ISP allowed a third party to install equipment at their datacentre which intercepted all your Internet traffic, (secretly so you wouldn't notice) so that your browsing could be tracked, webpage by webpage, entirely without your knowledge?

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An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they'd been infected with  …

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Online advert system Phorm could make the net less secure and breaches human rights, the service's creators have been told.

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BT Broadband has admitted that it carried out secret trials on 18,000 user accounts in autumn 2006 with technology from 121Media, which became the targeted advertising company Phorm.

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Only a week after fears were raised about the privacy implications of advertising service, Phorm, which monitors broadband users' internet usage in order to target relevant advertising at them (reported in 'In the News' on 27 March 2008), telecoms company, BT, has been accused of …

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Online advertising technology company, Phorm, which collects information about the browsing habits of internet users in order to display more relevant advertising, has called on members of the internet community to examine its technology after fears over privacy.

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Amid debate over how much data companies like Google and Yahoo should gather about people who surf the Web, one new company is drawing attention — and controversy — by boasting that it will collect the most complete information of all.

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Online advert system Phorm is illegal in the UK, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (Fipr), has argued in an open letter. BT, Talk Talk and Virgin have all signed up to use Phorm, which targets adverts to users based on web habits.

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