Leaked Report: ISP Secretly Added Spy Code To Web Sessions, Crashing Browsers
By Ryan Singel June 05, 2008 | 5:43:36 PmCategories: Network Neutrality
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.
The January 2007 report (.pdf) -- published Thursday by the whistle blowing site Wikileaks -- demonstrates the hazards broadband customers face when an ISP tampers with raw internet traffic for its own profit. The leak comes just weeks after U.S. broadband provider Charter Communications told users it would be testing a technology similar to what's described in the BT document.
The report documents BT's partnership with U.K. ad company Phorm, which specializes in building profiles of ISP customers, then serving targeted ads on webpages the user visits.
partnered with Phorm to let the company monitor and track 18,000 of the BT's customers. Phorm installed boxes on BT's network that redirected web requests through their proxy server.
Those boxes inserted JavaScript code into every web page downloaded by the users. That script then reported back to Phorm the contents of the web page, which Phorm used to create ad profiles of a user. Additionally, Phorm purchased advertising space on prominent web sites, showing a default ad for a charity. But when a user who had previously looked at car sites visited one of those pages, he instead got an advertisement for car insurance.
The users were not informed they were being made guinea pigs for a new revenue system for BT and had no way to opt out of the system, according to the report. The JavaScript caused flickering problems for some users as the script reported back information about the content of the web page to a Phorm server. The script also crashed browsers that loaded a website that relied excessively on anchor tags. Additionally, the rogue JavaScript showed up unexpectedly in user's posts to some web forums.
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