Vincent Arnold

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By Ryan Singel June 05, 2008 | 5:43:36 PM

An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users’ browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they’d been infected with adware.

The January 2007 report (.pdf) — published Thursday by the whistle blowing site Wikileaks — demonstrates the  hazards broadband customers face when an ISP tampers with raw internet traffic for its own profit. The leak comes just weeks after U.S. broadband provider Charter Communications told users it would be testing a technology similar to what’s described in the BT document.

The report documents BT’s partnership with U.K. ad company Phorm, which specializes in building profiles of ISP customers, then serving targeted ads on webpages the user visits.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Privacy.