Press & PR

A new online advertising deal announced recently has raised concerns over the way information about people's online habits will be shared.

The deal between BT, Virgin and Carphone Warehouse involves supplying usage data to an advertising company which will then use the information to make advertisements more suitable to individual browsing habits.

For example, a person making frequent visits to the Top Gear website may receive more car adverts, the Register reports.

However, concerns have been raised about the integrity of the company that will be handling the data.

Kent Ertegul, who runs advertiser Phorm, has been under the spotlight for past involvement in an advertising software project that was blacklisted after being identified as spyware by online security analysts.

F-Secure identified Ertegul's ContextPlus program as an application that "tracks which software is installed, what websites are visited and the user's browsing behaviour" in order to place targeted pop-ups on the users computer.

Although Phorm's ad software has been approved by Privacy International, the Register reports concerns among users that data will be handled in a similar way under the new deal.

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