Who needs Bundestrojaners? To make personalized advertizing possible, three British Internet providers (BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media) teamed up with a company called Phorm in order to track Internet user's behaviour and to send ads suiting to their profiles. Phorm promises to establish a new platform called OIX (Open Internet Exchange) that will send ads to a user whose browsing records were accessed by Phorm. This way advertizers can send ads to a user that might suit his 'needs'. The providers give Phorm access to all necessary information to get this job done.

Any objections against this worst case scenario of privacy are hit back by Phorm with shallow arguments like they're clearing their caches often or their privacy policy has been checked by Ernst & Young. I'm not convinced, and so aren't lots of British, because some of them make head against this unfortunate alliance. After having read this NYT article (the providers didn't want to bring their alliance to light, so British media echo was small) they have set up a website and put up resistance. I hope this will shed some light on this obscure business practice where BT denied secret tests with Phorm last summer.

Putting the lid on this affair, Phorm is a successor of 121Media, a supplier of Spy- and Adware. Quite a great alliance! (Source)