BT staffer Adam Liversage has quietly confirmed that the operator conducted a "very small scale technical test" (secret trial) of Phorm's data pimping system during 2007 (original news). Liversage issued the following statement to the operator’s community forums:


It's understood that the trial was tried on a live exchange first with no prior customer consultation because those that witnessed the activity on their connection and enquired were mislead by BT into thinking, ironically, that it was a DNS hijacker.

Indeed we'd question how successful such a trial could be without any information being "processed [AND OR] stored". That would be a bit like developing an operating system and never running it, although sometimes we think Microsoft probably do that too. Legal action by the affected BT customers has not been ruled out.

However, it's not all bad news because Liversage also revealed that BT were testing an opt-out solution that would remove the need for browser based cookies altogether. Sadly there's still no sign of a TalkTalk style opt-in method at launch:


Further details, including links to both BT Community Forum posts, can be found in Mel's topic on our forum - here.