BT, the UK’s largest ISP with ~4.8m subscribers has said in a statement to the press, that it’s going to concentrate on it’s network extention and improvement and abandon role out of the ‘interest-based’ advertising system Webwise (Phorm).

“…given our public commitment to developing next generation broadband and television services in the UK, we have decided to weigh up the balance of resources devoted to other opportunities…Given these resource commitments, we don’t have immediate plans to deploy Webwise today.”

BT has taken a lot of flack about it’s relationship with Phorm in the last year and rightly so. It undertook secret trials of the Phorm privacy invasion advertising system which scans all traffic going across your connection for potential advertising hooks, without informing users.

Phorm, who recently had to sell off a chunk of equity to keep afloat had this to say about the BT pull out:

“We continue to focus considerable effort on faster moving overseas opportunities. In so doing we have already minimised our dependency on the deployment by any single ISP or in any particular market,” being “engaged” with ISPs in 15 worldwide markets.

Virgin Media, Britain’s cable network provider and holder of the highest speed broadband available in the UK at 50Mbps, also originally signed a ‘a memorandum of understanding’ with Phorm along with BT and Carphonewarehouse’s Talk Talk ISPs. They had this to say about the possibility of a Phorm role out:

“We continue to believe interest-based advertising has potentially important benefits for consumers, internet service providers and website owners. However, given the fast moving nature of the sector, Virgin Media intends to extend its review of potential opportunities with suppliers, including Phorm, prior to making any commitment to launch any of these technologies.”

Virgin Media also stated that the privacy of it’s users was of top concern and it would be open with it’s customers about any developements with Phorm or any advertising system using it’s network. BT’s pull out from Phorm, which it had a close relationship with, is a big win for privacy advocates due to the fact that Phorm scans litterally everything that passes through the ISP and analyses the data for targeting ads. Even when you opt out, the system still scans all your traffic, it just doesn’t do anything with the data it collects, something that might drive users to switch ISPs.

[Via BBC]