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| Prosecute BT for illegal Phorm trial |
| Written by Irfan |
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BT should face prosecution for its "illegal" trials of a controversial ad-serving technology, a leading computer security researcher has said. Dr Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge made his comments after reviewing a leaked BT internal report. The document reveals details of a 2006 BT trial with the Phorm system, which matches adverts to users' web habits. "It's against the law of the land," he told BBC News. "We must now expect to see a prosecution." But BT plans to push ahead with a further trial of the technology later this summer, the BBC has learnt. "We have not announced a date yet; we are still planning - it will be quite soon," a spokesperson said. Revelations about earlier trials have prompted some customers to organise protests in London to coincide with BT's AGM on 16 July. 'Small test' The company did not inform customers that they were part of the original tests in 2006 and 2007, although 30,000 subscribers were involved. Nearly 19 million web pages were intercepted during the 2006 tests, according to the leaked report, posted to the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. BT described it as "a small-scale technical test". During the trials adverts were stripped out of web pages served up to BT customers and replaced with more targeted ads, if available. If none was available, adverts for one of three charities were inserted. The report also reveals that BT believes that a large scale deployment of Phorm will be "operationally challenging". It projected that it would require as many as 300 servers to roll out for all BT customers and added that BT was "unable to find hosting accommodation that will enable a deployment of this model". However, the BBC now understands that the technology behind Phorm has been updated and large-scale trials are much more feasible. Read full article @ BBC UK
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