"An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they'd been infected with adware," says Wired blogs. It's commenting on a January 2007 report at Wikileaks (PDF) which looks like a photocopy of a BT Retail Technology memo. (Its authenticity remains unconfirmed.)
Of 10,000 trial users, "at least 15-20 separate users did detect the presence of the system as evidenced from message board posts," says the memo. That's not many, but it would imply more than 1,300 in the first two weeks of full-scale operation.
The memo also warns:
Any deployment of PageSense will clearly require the user based to be informed. Despite the fact that the system is intended to improve the relevance of advertisements through anonymous collation of browsing histories, communications regarding advertisement systems and information collection could lead to negative perception if not carefully handled.
I think we can agree they got that bit right....
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