The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has confirmed that it is still assessing the prospect of opening a criminal case against BT following the operator’s secret trials of Phorm in 2006/2007. Phorm controversially worked with UK broadband ISPs ( BT , TalkTalk and Virgin Media ) to develop a system that would monitor what websites you viewed for use in targeted advertising campaigns, though many likened its service to Spyware.

Privacy campaigner Alexander Hanff (NoDPI) originally began pushing for the CPS to investigate at the end of 2008. This followed a decision by the City of London Police (CoLP) not to pursue BT's secret trials. The CoLP bizarrely stated that such an investigation would have been too costly, too complex and those taking part in the trials were curiously deemed to have given their implied consent (here).


Phorm itself has since gone quiet after its major UK ISP backers effectively put their plans on ice, at least for now. In addition the UK government is still under threat after the European Commission (EC) opened a second phase of infringement proceedings against it concerning a lack of full internet privacy and personal data protection (here). This is also directly linked with BT's secret trials.

We recently reported that the UK government had issued another formal response to counter the EC's threat, although the Home Office has this week refused to reveal the content of its reply.


It took them over two weeks just to inform us that the letter was confidential :glee: . We are currently still trying to obtain details of the letter via the EC, which has worked in the past but it’s a very slow process.