BT, who were a lot in media coverage recently due to their unsolicited deep packet inspection testing with their partners Phorm, yesterday (6th July 2009) cancelled their Phorm program. To many this is a welcome move by BT. Phorm, or rather their investors, replied with a falling share price of Phorm (PHRM on London’s AIM). Coincidence or purposely one day before MPs and some peers begin an investigation of internet privacy?

However this doesn’t mean all is over yet.

It may be that Phorm will rise rebranded once again with improved technology, or other forms of deep packet inspections implemented by the ISPs.
As long as there’s no definite ruling against deep packet inspection, this will remain on the table.

Why there’s no larger outcry against Phorm / DPI, may be possibly because a large part of net users don’t really understand / know what it does.
A wellknown comparison is: Imagine you send posts or packages to your family elsewhere, a private letter to someone you miss, etc.
The post will usually be handled by Royal Mail or equivalent (same with packages @ Parcel Force or equivalent). There they will open your
post / packages, look what you have there, read your mail, and then put advertising leaflets into your post alongside the original content.

This of course is a huge breach of privacy. Also you won’t know what the person will do with the knowledge of your mail’s content either.
Similar to your phone provider listening in to your phone conversations and then throwing in adverts at keywords during your conversation.
You wouldn’t like that either.

With DPI being implemented at ISP level, this means that your complete traffic will always be subject to DPI. Even if there were an opt-out scheme, who is to say that your traffic isn’t being inspected? How would you know?

I wonder if DPI isn’t actually illegal when it comes to communication interception and/or privacy law.

For now we have to see what the group of MPs and peers will find out and decide in their investigation of internet privacy.
Somehow, with New Labour there, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d approve of Deep Packet Inspection, or at least stay on a neutral stance towards DPI,
with the possibility to use the gathered data for their own purposes (which they then could epicly lose again somewhere).

It is good to know though that DPI won’t work with encrypted packets. So it may be time to invest more thoughts into traffic encryption

2 Responses to “Phormless BT”

1. Tom says:

   7th July , 2009 at 4:43 PM

   Achim you omit the fact that at no point in the DPI is Personally Identifiable information about the actual end user compromised or revealed therefore your example of sending snail mail is a bit exagerated. How different to Amazon placing flyers related to your purchasing habits in your next order?
2. AR says:

   7th July , 2009 at 4:59 PM

   You can chose to use Amazon or not, same as using adblockers / other script blockers (such as noscript in FF). DPI they say you can opt-out, but if you really are, you don’t know.