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BT Silences Customers Over Phorm

Posted by Soulskill on from the lalala-i-can't-hear-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that BT, the UK's dominant telecom and internet service provider, has 'banned all future discussion of Phorm and its "WebWise" targeted advertising product on its customer forums, and deleted all past threads about the controversy dating back to February.' Phorm is a controversial opt-out system for delivering targeted advertising that intercepts traffic passing through an ISP in order to profile subscribers via an assigned unique ID based on their online activities. Subscribers can opt-out at the Webwise website but are opted-in again if the Phorm cookie is cleared. Firefox users can install Melvin Sage's Firephorm add-on to manage their interaction with Phorm and Webwise."

5 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Heuristic: by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you have to suppress speech about what you are doing, you shouldn't be doing it.

    1. Re:Heuristic: by TubeSteak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      [Adam Liversage, BT's chief press officer] said the fact that BT had chosen not only to close the threads but delete them entirely was insignificant. "It doesn't matter either way because the people who are following this will have the threads backed up in multiple copies," he said.

      Wow, that's something only a PR man could say with a straight face.

      Seems they don't want to admit the difference between stopping speech and suppressing it.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    2. Re:Heuristic: by SmokeyTheBalrog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The US has a "supreme law of the land" yet that hasn't stopped the government from blatantly ignoring it whenever it's convenient.

      And I'm not talking about just the last eight years.

  2. What about wget ? by mmu_man · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Firefox can keep a cookie, but what about all those apps doing http requests (wget, media players, apt-get...) without maintaining cookies ??? Those can't opt-out, so basically they are forcing that on you.
    That's just plain discusting anyways.

  3. Re:Not a tech support issue? by AnalPerfume · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The smart person would see the lack of criticism as a pretty obvious sign that the site is being stage managed to hide the negative. Any time I compare products / services I look for the good and the bad reviews; the lack of any bad reviews means I stay away from it for just this reason. The lack of a thing can tell just as much as the presence of a thing.