oh to be a fly on the wall I wonder if they will make their minutes available?

my guess is that they are most likely to eventually all roll over and allow the cookies but add a new category which is something like "ISP Issued Tracking Cookies" and when you click on the description it will have the verbatim PR double speak which announces that this is all for your benefit, move along, nothing to see here. Of course in return the makers of these tools will be offered a preferential OIX service which causes their ads to miraculously appear should you ever search for spyware/adware/malware.

The chances of the "anti-spyware coalition" actually having the morals, ethics and balls to get together and say "phuck off, this is not only spyware but it opens the door to adverts being delivered via an ISP push"

...does it piss you off when your watching TV and there is a break every four minutes?

...does it piss you off the the TV adverts are all delivered to your living room far louder and garishly and without caching your viewing (PVR) there's no way to avoid them?

well if this goes ahead within a very short period you can expect to have ads injected as "your page is loading". No fast forward, no PVR, just your on personalized adverting stream which you are funding with every click.

so the question is:

Is the "Anti-Spyware Coalition" an ethical group of businesses which can see further than the promise of a buck, or, is this just a set up for a PR stunt?

I've seen the future, I know what the most clicked ad will be!

Ladies and gentleman, I give you:

The Shite Free ISP

- Are you sick of your adjacked Internet connection?

- Do you find it frustrating that a simple search on the internet is now more like playing "hunt the article" in a thick glossy magazine?

- Are you fed up with having your clickstream traded without seeing a penny?

welcome to the "Shite Free ISP" Model

Here we offer secure VPN access to our centrally hosted servers, sited on the backbone of the internet, *just like in the good old days* but with built in ad-blocking at source from our "to the second" updated ad-serving lists.

Also within our package you have the option, in conjunction with the worlds largest and most popular search engine, to record your clickstream and then trade your browsing history, enabling you to make money on every click.

Block unwanted adjacking and trade your clickstream, welcome to the world of the Shite free ISP, making privacy a reality!

(all rights reserved, copyright oldghosts (c) 2008)

anyone interested in making this happen? I bought www.mywebusage.com perhaps we could start up a clickstream trading floor, this would also 'monetize' individuals private web usage and clickstream making any unauthorised harvesting thieft! oh hang on, it already is!! gah!

Trouble is, cookies that are set the way Phorm does it can easily be read back by any site that wants to. Therefore tracking sites don't need to set their own cookies any more. They can just use the ones set by spying ISPs.

Also, if IP addresses are going to be regarded as personal information, use of Phorm-like cookies is going to become the standard way for ISPs to spy on their customers.

This will blow the entire anti-spyware industry out of the water. In future, users can be tracked simply using the cookies set by ISPs. Therefore you'd better block those cookies or give up the anti-spyware game altogether. Killing these cookies is by far the MOST IMPORTANT thing the anti-spyware industry needs to do.

I expect the ASC will reach the same conclusion, eventually.

The BT privacy policy has recently been changed regarding their use of cookies, on the 14/04/2008 this was their statement regarding the their use of cookies, "WE DO NOT STORE INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR TELEPHONE NUMBER, ACCOUNT OR PAYMENT DETAILS IN THE COOKIE, AND THIS INFORMATION CANNOT BE ACCESSED USING IT. BT´S COOKIES DO NOT COLLECT ANY INFORMATION REGARDING THE USE OF YOUR PC OR YOUR INTERNET BROWSING IN ANY WAY.

PLEASE NOTE THAT AS THE COOKIE IS BASED ON YOUR PC, WE WILL NOT FIND IT IF YOU VISIT OUR WEBSITES USING A DIFFERENT PC TO THE ONE YOU REGISTERED ON."

Now it states (don't know when this was changed not been keeping an eye on it)

"We collect information from visitors to our websites to help us to make improvements to the websites and to the services we make available. We know, for instance, how many visitors there are to each website, when they visited, for how long and to which areas of our website they went. We may share this information with our advertisers and to other companies which offer their goods or services on our websites. It helps to show these organisations how effective our websites are as sales channels for their products. You or any other individual cannot be identified from the information we share as the data is aggregated and anonymised."

Surely if they change their privacy policy we as customers should be informed of such a big change, and whether we wish to agree to the change or not i.e. leave BT without incurring a charge for the rest of the contract period. I have tried to get a solid statement from BT about this, but I just get fobbed off with the same old corporate spiel, and their customer service dept are more or less ignorant of the facts regarding Phorm.

I much prefer my idea..

The public wireless mesh network.

The tech savvy build their nodes and join a central backbone network and sell on connectivity to it to those incapable of creating their own nodes.

Fed up of the crappy ISP's? replace them! Lets get the techies running the show once again :)

Cheers for the update...

Checked their website here. There basic web page privacy policy.

http://www2.bt.com/btPortal/application?pageid=pan_privacy_policy&siteArea=pan

Found this amongst it. The critical bit is the bottom three lines of this section.

"What personal information do we collect about you, and when do we collect it?

We may ask you for information to enable us to provide a service to you and we collect this information by telephone, written correspondence or via a website. We may ask you for information including your name, private/business address, contact telephone numbers and email address. We may also ask you for other information that relates to the service you are using or ordering. For example, we may need your credit card number to charge you for certain services.

* When you (or someone using your telephone line) make a telephone call or send a fax that uses our telephone network or connect to the world wide web, we keep a record of that call (including the number called) to enable BT to charge for it. We also receive from other operators information about calls made over our network, where we need that information for connecting and billing purposes.

* If someone abuses or damages the telephone network, for example by making offensive or nuisance calls, we may keep information relating to that abuse.

* We have information about your use of our services (such as the amount of time you spend on-line), which we use to manage our network, and for billing. We may also use this information for marketing products and services but we will give the option to opt out of receiving this material.

* If you enter into any of our competitions or promotions, we may ask for information about you, which will be made clear at the time you enter. We will also inform you of the purposes for which the information you provide may be used.

* We may ask you from time to time about what use you make of the services we provide, what other services you would like us to provide in the future, and for other information, such as lifestyle data.

* We collect information from visitors to our websites to help us to make improvements to the websites and to the services we make available. We know, for instance, how many visitors there are to each website, when they visited, for how long and to which areas of our website they went. We may share this information with our advertisers and to other companies which offer their goods or services on our websites. It helps to show these organisations how effective our websites are as sales channels for their products. You or any other individual cannot be identified from the information we share as the data is aggregated and anonymised.

We do not use this information to:

* identify individuals visiting our website; or

* analyse your visits to any other websites (except that we do track you if you go to websites carrying our banner, but we do not identify personal details while we do this); or

* track any Internet searches which you may make while on our website."

As a caveat to that there is a section on pages they run which has this.

Does BT´s privacy policy protect me when I use BT´s websites?

BT´s privacy policy also applies to information collected when you use any of our websites.

You do not have to register to access most of our websites. However, if you provide information via the "contact us" or any of the other interactive features, you indicate your consent to our use of your personal data in the manner described in this privacy policy.

* If you do register on one of our websites, we may ask you to provide personal details such as name, address, e-mail address, telephone number and, where appropriate, BT account number. We also ask you to choose a password, and to complete a password security question and answer, in case you forget your password for any reason.

* Once you have registered on one of our websites, we may keep a record of your use of any of the services made available via that particular website. (Please see "When does BT use cookies" below for more information on how we do this).

* If you choose not to register with us and only browse our websites, we may gather information to help make your visit to our website more satisfying. However, this information will not identify you personally. (Please see "When does BT use cookies" below for more information on how we do this).

* If you do not wish to register, you will still be able to use and order some of the services offered via our websites. We will only ask you to provide such information as necessary to enable us to carry out the transaction in question. We will not use that information for any other purpose. You should note that some services are only available if you register on the website first.

If you have registered for any of the services available through our websites you may choose to cancel that registration at any time. You can do this in one of two ways:

* return to the original registration page and following the instructions for cancelling the registration; or

* send an e-mail to us by completing the feedback form

Please ensure you inform us of the service which you wish to cancel.

If you do either of these, your personal details will be deleted from our website database.

If you have registered you have direct control over information in your personal profile on our website. You can access and change this information at any time by using the "Update your profile" link.

Over and above what BT does to safeguard your privacy and security on-line, there are a number of things you can do to protect yourself from Internet fraud:

* Choose a password (letters and digits) you can remember but others will not guess, change it regularly and, if you do write it down, keep it somewhere safe and secure.

* When you have finished your session on our website, make sure you prevent your details being seen by anyone that you do not wish to see them. So, if you have registered and logged in, remember to log off.

* Clear any cache so there is no record of any transactions left on screen - both Netscape and Internet Explorer let you do this.

* We also recommend you then close your browser so any history of the session is cleared. As an extra precaution, your session on bt.com will time out if you have not used the site for 30 minutes.

* We collect information from visitors to our websites to help us to make improvements to the websites and to the services we make available. We know, for instance, how many visitors there are to each website, when they visited, for how long and to which areas of our website they went. We may share this information with our advertisers and to other companies which offer their goods or services on our websites. It helps to show these organisations how effective our websites are as sales channels for their products. You or any other individual cannot be identified from the information we share as the data is aggregated and anonymised.

* We do not use this information to:

* identify individuals visiting our website; or

* analyse your visits to any other websites (except that we do track you if you go to websites carrying our banner, but we do not identify personal details while we do this); or

* track any Internet searches which you may make while on our website.

So apparently you can ask them to remove you from their DB.

Firstly, they keep on about how the data they have illegally intercepted is not identifiable with a person, but it's still illegally intercepted.

Secondly, I have decided they will not get to look at my web site, to protect my readers. So, I need to put a cookie on the browser that tries to look at my pages, then check to see if it has stayed the same, or been added to by Phorm. If it has, I don't serve the page, but a notice saying they are being spied on. Is that fairly easy in Javascript?

You should be able to get all you need here:

http://www.dephormation.org.uk/web_masters.html

Bt have now changed their privacy policy back to how it was previously!!

What does that tell you.................................