Rights Groups Speak Out Against Phorm, UK Comm. Database

MJackson writes "The Open Rights Group (ORG) has issued a public letter to the Chief Privacy Officers (or the nearest equivalent) for seven of the world's largest website giants (including Microsoft and Google), asking them to boycott Phorm. The controversial Phorm system works with broadband ISPs to monitor what websites you visit for use in targeted advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has issued a new report slamming the UK government's plans for a Communications Database. This would be designed to intercept and log every UK ISP user's e-mail headers, website accesses and telephone history. The report warns that the public are often, 'neither served nor protected by the increasingly complex and intrusive holdings of personal information invading every aspect of our lives.'"

Change your ISP

[Ragein]

If you don't like what your ISP is planning to do then change it. Personally I will be trying this:- http://superawesomebroadband.com/ [superaweso...adband.com] Does anyone have any experiance with them?

Rowntree Reform Trust

[krou]

Links to the Rowntree report: executive summary [jrrt.org.uk], and the full report [jrrt.org.uk]. (Both in PDF format). It's worth mentioning that their report doesn't particularly single out the communications database. They assessed 46 databases across all the major UK government departments. They found that at least one quarter "are almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law", and that these "should be scrapped or substantially redesigned", while over "half have significant problems with privacy or effectiveness and could fall foul of a legal challenge". Less than 15% were believed to be "effective, proportionate and necessary". They had some equally damning things to say about the cost of IT projects in the public sector, and the high failure rate of the projects (only 30% succeed).