Tim Berners-Lee attacks web 'snooping'

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee today made an impassioned attack on systems that allow service providers to monitor the content of private web traffic for information they can sell to advertisers.

Service providers needed to inspect individual data packets for routing information, like an address on an envelope. But so-called deep packet inspection (DPI) systems that look at the content of a packet are equivalent to a postman who opens all the envelopes in his charge, Sir Tim said.

He told a House of Commons round-table on internet privacy: "People use the Web when they are in crisis, when they are worried if they have some dreadful disease, when they are worried that their loved one has cancer, when they are wondering whether they are homosexual, when they're wondering if they should talk about it…

"We use the Internet for all these things and we use it without a thought. It is very important that use it without the thought that when we click [on a link] a postmaster will not know what we have just clicked on, which might affect whether we can get life insurance, or whether we will get another job. We should use it like we put a letter in the mail, knowing that it will go through the postal service untampered with and unsnooped on."

Robert Topolski, a member of the US Federal Communications Commission panel, explained that DPI has become an issue only comparatively recently because for a long time processors were not powerful enough to do it.

"We have spent the last two years trying to convince users that they can trust the Internet to carry all their personal information, or to carry out sensitive banking transactions… that they can use it instead of their encyclopaedias to look up the strange rash that they don't want their neighbours to know about."

Now the very people who had been trusted to carry that information were ready to trade that information for money, Topolski told the round table organised by Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokeswoman Baroness Miller.

Also at the meeting, and complaining that he was not asked to be on the round-table panel, was Kent Ertugral, founder of Phorm, whose DPI service is currently being trialled by BT.

He said all harvested information was "anonymised" so that it could not be attached to a name, and that the targeted advertising it generated could produce revenues that could sustain industries such as newspapers that had been undermined by the Internet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said it was not targeted advertising that he objected to, it was the fact that users had no choice in the matter… people were snooping on their web activity whether they liked it or not.

He pointed out: "There are other ways to do it, via a browser. But then the user has the choice of whether to allow it or not."

Marc Burgess, Phorm senior vice-president, said users could opt out of his company's system and that great trouble had been taken to protect privacy so that there was no way anyone could track information back to a particular person.

He added: "We don't store a person's browsing history. All we store is an all-round characterisation of the interest someone has shown in a particular web page."

Dr Richard Clayton, treasurer of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, asked why if the Phorm system was so wonderful did the company not ask people to opt in rather than giving them the option of opting out.

"They won't do it because they known take-up will be low and they won't be able to make a lot of money," he said.

Comment: Victorian echoes of debate