The change in the Terms and Conditions certainly paves the way and gives the impression Virgin Media is about to launch into activity with Phorm.

But wait a minute, Virgin Media might have welcomed and made friends with Phorm but its customers haven’t and never will.

Clearly, Virgin Media is going against the wishes of 95% of its customer base. This data based on our own poll, of which just under 1,000 people in our Virgin Media forums took part in. Agreed, its a small sample size to the whole of Virgin Media’s broadband customer base of around 3.7 Million, but the overall result is that we believe that 95% of VM’s BB customer base would strongly object to their browsing habits being tracked, so some third party (In this case, Phorm) can come along and serve up relevant adverts.

The clause under Section G of VM Terms and Conditions, which appears to have changed now says:-

By having the services we provide installed in your home and/or by using them you are giving us your consent to use your personal information together with other information for the purposes of providing you with our services, service information and updates, administration, credit scoring, customer services, training, tracking use of our services (including processing call, usage, billing, viewing and interactive data), profiling your usage and purchasing preferences for so long as you are a customer and for as long as is necessary for these specified purposes after you terminate your services. We may occasionally use third parties to process your personal information in the ways outlined above. These third parties are permitted to use the data only in accordance with our instructions.

The whole concept of targeted advertising has caused a major backlash between the three main ISPs that have signed an agreement to use Phorm, Virgin Media, BT and Talk Talk. The main issue with many angry punters of all three ISPs mentioned above, is that this appears to be a system that customers have automatically been opted into, so if customers don’t want this, they have to opt out by storing a ‘cookie’ by ticking a checkbox on the Webwise site.

The bottom line is that this is YOUR data that is being used to profile YOUR browsing habits, so Phorm can send you an ad, should you visit a website linked into the OIX network, you click on this advert, Phorm and your ISP take a slice of the revenue generated from the paying advertiser.

Lets cut to the chase. Basically, the whole process appears to be just another form of Spyware, but on a more massive scale and condoned by the three ISPs and lets not listen to the pathetic attempts of Phorm and or their PR agencies trying to promote their Webwise service as some form of protection for rogue sites, there is a feature in most modern browsers that certainly have this protection already, a claim by Phorm’s CEO, Kent Ertugrul, is turned off by default. However, I am pretty sure my up-to-date browser security features are ‘turned on’ by default, as I do recall having had warnings of visiting dodgy sites before now and I don’t recall switching this on ever.

Below is a link to our thread with a list of useful links which contain our right to protest to this ridiculous and shady type of practise. We hope you find them useful as did we and anyone who really dislikes this idea, you are welcome to join in on the debate.

• Links to protest at the possible deployment of Phorm.

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