Consumer Surveys

BT and Phorm have never published the original user research which they quote as giving approval to Webwise/ Phorm. Nor have they been willing to disclose the specific questions users were asked.

Which? survey

In February 2009, the UK's Consumers' Association magazine Which? published a two page article entitled "Online privacy matters". (Which? March 2009 p22-23). This included the results of a survey they had conducted covering 2643 respondents. The survey demonstrated that the vast majority of people people were not happy having their web activity tracked.

A Press Association article reporting these results was pulled from the Internet on Thursday 26th February 2009, the same day as Daily Telegraph, Channel 4 and Virgin Media reports were removed. MSN continued to report it for several months: "Around four in five (84%) of those surveyed by which.co.uk said they would not be happy having their surfing habits tracked in this way and four in 10 (42%) would consider leaving their internet service provider if they introduced a system such as Webwise."

On 27th February The Register reported that the press release for the Which? article had been withdrawn pending the outcome of discussions between Phorm's libel lawyers and the Consumers' Association. Phorm's objections to the article were focussed on Which?'s explanation of how their technology worked. However, the effect was to suppress further publication of the results of the survey.

On 5th March, Wikileaks reported that "UK media suppressed Phorm survey and article" and released a PDF of the article.

Those who are interested in understanding English libel laws may want to start with this Wikipedia article. An interesting article contrasting English and US libel laws was published in The Guardian on 23rd February 2009.

Burst Media survey

Also in February 2009, Burst Media published a survey of 4000 adults. Only one in five (23.2%) respondents would not mind if non-personally identifiable information was collected if ads were better targeted. (The Burst Media survey covered tracking by websites visited, and not by intermediaries such as ISPs).

Phorm Populous Survey

On Wednesday 3rd June 2009 as part of the launch of Webwise Discover Phorm reported a survey of 2075 broadband users carried out the previous Thursday on their behalf by Populus. Phorm claimed this showed that 82% of broadband users who expressed a preference liked Webwise with Anti-Phishing and Discover.

Phorm did not publish the questions in the survey, nor did they disclose whether the people asked had been informed that in order to use Webwise their web browsing would be intercepted and read. Responding to the PCPro article reporting the announcement of Webwise Discover author jonaba said "I took part in the survey. It was very much framed as a "hey, wouldn't it be great if you could go to a web page and be given loads of cool links to things that interest you without the hassle of having to search for it" type of thing. And no, deep packet inspection wasn't mentioned. ... It took me a couple of minutes to twig what the survey was really about and I've been following the phorm saga for a while."

The Populus poll was later made available revealing that the two key questions were:

In the survey, people were not told that in order to use Webwise Discover all their web activity would have to be intercepted and most read.

University of Pennsylvania & Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology Survey

On 29th September 2009, the University of Pennsylvania and the Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology issued a research paper entitled 'Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It'. This revealed that 66 percent of US internet users do not want to be sent tailored advertising based on their browsing habits. It also showed that when the actual methods companies use to track internet traffic were revealed, the number of people who were put off the method of marketing rose to between 73 and 86 percent.

The full report is available on the New York Times's website.