The European Commission has recently threatened to sanction Britain for the manner in which it has implemented the European Community Data Protection legislation. The European Telecommunications Commissioner said last week, “European privacy rules are crystal clear; a person’s information can only be used with their prior consent”. However, the on-line world to which those rules are applied has changed, and though the rules themselves may be simple, how they are applied is therefore not so straightforward.
The latest technological advance and cause of EC upset, is a targeted advertising system called “Phorm”. Phorm is a piece of software that may be implemented by ISPs in order to track what people are interested in. In the UK, Phorm’s partners include BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media, which together represent approximately 70% of UK broadband ISP markets. Once people have had their interests tracked, the adverts that may be displayed on the pages that they view can be adapted so that there are adverts that people are more likely to find interesting.
Targeted advertising in this manner, is something that has already gone on for some time. Google, when it launched its email service, Google Mail, made it clear that when the emails on its systems were scanned (as all emails are, for spam and viruses) it would also scan those emails for users’ personal interests. The adverts that were then shown within Google Mail, could then be targeted to the users preferences.
BT admit that, for at least the years 2006 and 2007, no consent was ever requested of their users within their terms and conditions. However, Phorm argue that consent is not required. They contend that their system is such that no human ever reviews the information and nothing personally identifiable is ever permanently recorded, it assigns a randomly generated number to a user and then, after having reviewed the sites that that randomly generated number has visited, assigns codes that equate to areas of interest. The site’s history is then deleted so that what is left is a randomly generated number with particular interests, when that randomly generated number reaches a particular site, adverts will be shown that reflect those interests.
Whether it is ultimately deemed either an invasion of privacy, or a breach of the Data Protection act or not, if the technique is unpopular with consumers, then they will vote with their feet and ISPs that continue to implement unpopular policies will lose customers. This may not be enough to prevent the European Commission looking at the UK’s implementation of the Data Protection Act, which means we may yet see some significant changes to the way people’s data is dealt with in this country.
- Richard Dickinson and Alex Watt
