An internal British Telecom document was released two days ago on the Wikileak website that provides the results of British Telecom’s validation of Phorm, also known as (aka 121Media), Deep Packet Inspection. According to that report 18000 users were chosen as test objects without their knowledge or consent. In that 2-week period more than 18 million page requests were intercepted and injected with JavaScript.
Only 15-20 users recognized the interference and reacted negatively to it. It goes on by suggesting changes so that the process will be 100% transparent to the user which simply means that they want a system where the user is not knowing that his connection is being hijacked and misused.
I have not had time to read the whole report but it seems like an illegal act to me to inject advertisement on web pages without the users and webmasters consent. In addition to spying on the users about 7000 cookies were dropped as well.
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I hope that there will be an unparalleled public outcry and coverage in Britain and world wide. Spread the word.
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2 Responses to “British Telecom Phorm report leaked”
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[...] – The anti-phorm Firefox Extension We have covered Phorm before at Ghacks. It is a very scary cooperation between several Internet Service Providers and [...]
http://content.screencast.com/media/686618b3-bad2-40bc-a9e8-273508a0ddbe_e8b4f9d2-a42b-457d-a422-662f833196ed_static_0_0_2008-06-06_1519.png
^^ look above, although bad it’s not the worst case scenario since I’ve got ad block plus + dephormation