Encoded

Yet another case of big brother spying on your web traffic surfaced recently. Wired reported that British Telecom, an internet service provider, secretly partnered with Phorm to inject JavaScript into all pages served to 18,000 of their customers. The JS code was used to track users’ movements on the web and serve up ads accordingly. Some users believed their computers had been infected with adware when the JS code Phorm injected caused their browsers to crash.

The desire to better target ads to consumer use has been a long sought goal for many companies. Both AOL and Yahoo have purchased or constructed similar ad tracking software recently in order to better target ads to users. AOL calls their software Platform A. Yahoo calls their software Amp. Additionally, Google surfaces targeted ads in their search results based on the search terms, known as Google Ad sense / Ad words.

Internet users who ever believed their surfing was anonymous are naive. Any web developer knows that every connection to a server passes, at the bare minimum, an IP address. But has British Telecom gone too far? Unlike Google, Yahoo and AOL who can only track your movement on their sites, BT tracked all traffic regardless of destination.

As the web becomes even more social, the sense of anonymity once present in early days of the web is quickly fading. Google popularized email addresses that are your real name. Long gone are the days of obscured screennames once so common to Hotmail and AOL. This movement came with the loss of some privacy, but users could feel secure knowing that surfing from one random website to another didn’t mean seeing ads from the last style site you visited. If a user had just spent an two hours looking up travel destinations, they could rest assured that they wouldn’t see travel ads when surfing to a music site. But, as companies seek to improve ad revenues, they will all desire to garner higher click thru rates and higher profits to pay for the vast server farms needed to sustain their companies.

You can find the original leaked report on Wiki Leaks here.