[SimonHickling]

This received today from BT.


Simon,

Please accept my apologies for the further delay in responding to your questions.

In your email, you referred to The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) and how Webwise fits within this context. We believe that, in general, we can rely upon website owners' implied consent where websites have not taken steps to make their sites inaccessible generally, for example by excluding major search engines such as Google via robots.txt.

Over and above this, we are also taking reasonable steps to exclude specific websites from profiling upon specific request from the website owner. As per my previous email, if you provide me with the domain name for your website (and confirmation of ownership) then we will ensure that it is excluded from profiling within Webwise. I can assure you that we have taken advice and believe our approach is both entirely reasonable and complies with relevant legislation. I am not able to share that advice with you in detail and, and as noted in my previous email, I am not able to provide you with BT's IP address ranges.

I am afraid that if you do not provide us with the domain name of your website then we will be unable to act on your request to specifically exclude your website from profiling if an opted-in end-user visits your site.


You also referred to copyright implications arising from the implementation of Webwise. Again, having taken advice, it is our position that the planned trial of the BT Webwise system will not involve infringement of the copyright of any website owner.

Regards,

I'm pondering my response