Following reports and subsequent concern that three of the UK’s largest ISPs are to team up with advertising service Phorm (click here for more details), The Register has reported that BT had already previously passed data on subscribers to Phorm last year, despite the fact that at the time, the companies denied any working relationship.
An Open Internet Exchange that matches advertisers with publishers, Phorm’s service has been met with caution following previous dabblings in spyware. An article in The Register suggests that BT was previously reluctant to acknowledge partnership with Phorm due to uncertainty of the security of the pilot scheme.
Despite an open investigation into suspected redirection to a domain known as ‘dns.sysip.net’, a confirmed Phorm domain, BT firmly denied any acknowledgement, sending a statement to the thinkbroadband.com threader stating: “sysip.net is a DNS hijacker, similar to a malware therefore your anti virus scan would not have picked this up.”
Since the partnership announcement, BT has now confirmed that it has “carried out extensive commercial, legal and technical due diligence on Phorm.”
Suspicion has been raised that the partnership between BT and Phorm had been agreed quite some time ago and subscriber data could have been passed on without any notification.
Neither BT nor Phorm have been available for comment.
Source: The Register
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