BT's Phorm small print: It's all your fault

@RogueElement

Yep,

A contract is illegal if it favours one party above the other this has been tested in court and there are precendents.

Unfair Terms and Conditions and common law.

A contractual agreement which has not been individually negotiated will be regarded as Unfair, if contrary to the requirement of good faith , it causes a significant imbalance in the parties rights and obligations under the agreement , to the detriment of the consumer.

A contract shall be regarded as not being individually negotiated where it has been drafted in advance and the consumer has therefore not been able to infuence the substance of the terms.

So phuck em and leave. You wont see them anywhere near a court cos they know they will loose. AND it aint a criminal offence its a civil one. So its up to them to prove their loss.

PJM

RIPA I think only applies to public bodies...

BT is not a public body, it is a private company. Therefore as far as I can see (IANAL) RIPA does not apply to it. Please read RIPA. Now do you see what I mean?

That's OK though, because other rules govern the legality of wiretapping by private bodies, and the European regulations prohibit it. What they are doing is illegal but nothing to do with RIPA. I think it clouds the issue.

Why does BT have any customers? I'm confused about this. I understand the phone line market, people may need phonelines for broadband, but why are so many of the posters here with BT at all? If Lehman Brothers can hit the dust so can BT. I can't wait to see the day. If I had shares in BT I would sell, sell, sell.

Wake up n smell the coffee... Leave BT

Wake up n smell the coffee... Leave BT. Nuff said

https as server default

The time has come to run all webservers using SSL encryption (https://), these days server hardware is powerfull enough for that.

That's what I will be doing with my webservers and I would suggest this to everyone, at least you can be sure noone can modify any of your content en-route.

Game over for phorn on my web servers.

Not only

do you need to opt out from every userid on every PC on your connection... you actually need to do it with every browser you use also...

For example if you have multiple browsers installed (eg IE, firefox, safari, opera, chrome), you need to Opt out using each of the installed browsers (browsers don't share their cookies).

Maybe this opens a legal counter attack... if their information doesn't specifically state that you need to opt-out with each browser you use, Opt out using IE and then sue them when they monitor you when you use firefox (after all they didn't say you would need to opt out with firefox too, and you have explicitly asked them not to monitor you as evidenced by the cookie in IE).

Exclusion list sent

As a web freelancer with a number of personal and commercial projects, I've just emailed the exclusion mailbox a list of about 35 domains to be excluded. And as earlier comments have said, come on everyone with a website or websites - let's swamp them.

This may actually be a better one.

"11. If you end your agreement for the service during the relevant minimum

period you will have to pay a charge, by way of compensation to us, for

ending it early unless paragraphs 9 or 10 of these service terms apply or

you are ending your agreement because of a change made which is to your

significant disadvantage. You will find details of these charges in the

price terms."

Hmm... This may actually be good news. Since the disadvantage need no longer be material, it brings into play the condition that now, you have the uneasy feeling that your doings on-line are being monitored and you feel you can no longer trust your ISP. That may well be a "significant" disadvantage, though not a "material" one.

That means that you can avoid the penalty charges for ending early if you no longer trust BT.

I'll just block all BT Internet mails then

I know of no sensible people who use BT internet

so I'll just block all routes to and from it.

Problem solved

Voila !!!

Will all with access

Will all those with access to the phorm profiler and other information have the police checks?

Since BT will be profiling young children what is to stop a paedophile from working gathering this information and also using the system to get personal details on the children. Yes I know you all keep saying it is anonymous but there is ways with a system like this to gather hidden information. We also know that word of mouth isn’t enough in today’s society with the paedophiles

Moving from BT and keeping your eMail

@ ted frater:

I moved from BT over 3 months ago. Not only for broadband, but telephony as well.

I can *still* send and receive mail via BT's mail servers using my old login and address.

Don't know if Virgin would be quite so incompetent, though.

eh?

"Customers who are invited to join the trial and decline are still subject to the new terms and conditions - it's just that BT and Phorm promise to ignore their traffic as it passes through profiling hardware."

And how exactly are they going to do that if the user's traffic is anonymous to the system? Unless it isn't after all...

interesting phormula ...

So.. they will be intercepting everyones data, it's just that they promise to ignore the info from people who Opt Out? They're going right ahead with it even though they haven't yet figured out how to do it, meaning it doesn't even comply with the t&c that people are agreeing to ??

I'm a bit confused.

Florence please don't use the pedophile line, lest this turn into a complete farce . This is bad enough that you don't need to throw in the words terrorist or pedophile to make a point against it. You need to stop doing that, you're as bad as everyone else (ie: the government) who relies on those words to get action taken. Enough is enough.

Lets face it though, even if BT only had 2000 customers, you wouldn't even be able to get that many to change. .

I'm also wondering how every owner of every website is supposed to know about Phorm and disagree to it? This is completely unfair, putting the burden on everyone who uses the internet to know about some random company (Phorm) and take action to make sure they don't negatively effect them when they're just trying to do what we all have every right to do unhindered- use the freaking internet. They are exploiting everyone to the Nth degree.

Eg: If there are 6 companies like Phorm does that mean that every website online is fair game until the individuals in charge find out about these companies, track all 6 down, find an address for all 6 and submit 6 separate request to be put on their blacklist... WHAT??

What can be done besides switch ISPs? Not enough people even know about this, so you'll never get enough people actually going to the effort to switch.. It's hopeless

So they spy on web traffic to serve ads to your competitors.

It seems to be that as a website publisher, its not in your interest to let Phorm profile your sites visitors.

If you dont use opt out and dont use OIX (or whoever it is that servers the ads?) you are effectively saying, please serve adverts for my competitors to my customers (or potential) for similar products and services. I really cant see any sound business mind agreeing to that, or wanting it.

I am about to drop Virgin for completely poor service, but certainly wont be going to BT.

Exclusion

Well I've had acknowledgement that my site has been excluded and there has been no obviously "suspicious" traffic so I think we can say that they don't scrape before exclusion.

Dephorming the Reg

Will the Register lead the way and add the appropriate wording to deny Phorm the data-mining rights to it's web trafic?

fnord

___

Penguins, cos I've never heard of them performing nasty data-mining operations.