Bad Phorm

Monday 22nd September, 2008 @ 11:44 pm

No Phorm
So apparently the UK government doesn’t care about a private company wiretapping its citizens and giving them to another company (for money) as long as when they roll it out to everyone they are sure to ask for permission first (i.e. most probably at the end of a huge EULA).

I can’t say I’m surprised but I am pretty disappointed. When it first emerged on The Register that Phorm had been monitoring the internet communications of BT customers I was a BT employee. When it came out that BT outright lied on to those tech-savvy customers who raised the issue my opinions of my employer had sadly dropped to an all-time low.

I’m not someone who believes in publicly criticising the company I am currently working for (partly because the company I work for currently is awesome) and didn’t want to straight after I left at the risk of seeming bitter or unprofessional but I feel it needs to be publicly stated that I did not at any time agree with the actions that were being taken by my current employer and everything negative I found out second-hand and eventually was part of the reason I left.

I’m not sure what the management of BT that thought that Phorm was a good idea were up to at the time but I feel they may need a little reminding that massively alienating a huge portion of your technical user-base is probably not the best way to run an ISP, considering how much influence we have on our non-geeky friends’ technology choices.

As for their “anonymous” technology, if I’m “anonymous” enough for you to be able to track me across multiple IPs then I’m not “anonymous”!

Posted in My Life, Politics, Software Development