Quote:
Originally Posted by icsys
News stories continue to appear through the 'lesser' news channels.
Is Phorm getting to BT?
Market analyst Gartner even suggests that telco's should gain revenue from advertising and application services based on what they know about their customers.
Delcroix, a Gartner research vice-president, said the issue of customer profiling was overblown. "Telcos do not know as much about their customers as Google or FaceBook know about theirs," he said. Gartner called for regulators to allow telcos to compete on level terms with search and social network firms. |
The thing is, BT already have this option. They have a partnership (often forgotten) with Yahoo!. Many years ago, when ISP's were mere conduits of data, Compuserve had slidden out of site, and AOL was offering dumbed down internet for the masses, BT decided to partner with Yahoo and give all its customers a Yahoo! home page, and Yahoo! webmail. BT ISP became an AOL clone. Content was the buzzword. Delivering targetted customisable content to your customers, not just connectivity. We moaned at the time, but we got used to it, and learned to use it when it was useful, and get our information and services where we wanted to - sometimes via the Yahoo! portal, sometimes just via the wild wild web.
We got all or most of the ancillary Yahoo! services like photo pages, and Launchcast internet radio, and Yahoo Groups, and the great bonus (?) of targetted advertising channels. All quite tacky, but perfectly legal, and if you didn't like it you could always use Firefox, a hosts file, Adblock, and block most (if not all) the ads.
Then BT also decided a few years later to get back into exploiting its own brand identity and after pushing the ISP customers to the off to the edge of the BT group identity, (partly because of competition regulations) dragged us back into the centre of BT Group again, giving us "aligned" billing all dealt with via bt.com, and a bt.com login to manage our phone lines and even our now rebranded yet again BT Broadband internet accounts and our BT Vision accounts, and our BT Anywhere mobile accounts - you name it - BT sold itand it all happened on bt.com. With the bt.com site, came a whole new list of ad partnerships, and of course much more cookie placing.
Again - a perfectly legal form of behavioural targetting of BT's own customers when they as individuals had logged in with a username and password to a BT web page. The sort of thing the quote above refers to..
Not, note, when we were "on the internet" but only when we chose to login to either a BTYahoo! or
www.bt.com site.
Not confusing every individual on the home network, with the same IP address, but behind an password protected login page - each individual having their own login.
I may not have "liked" this but it was easy to avoid and it was legal and worked well. And presumably earned BT Retail money.
But then they got greedy. They wanted not just to monitor what I did while using the Yahoo Home page, but what I did while online no matter where I was. Hence the use of DPI, the man in the middle technology.
Hence the current mess they are in.