[Based on the article titled Use of Web Tracking Tool Raises Privacy Issue in Britain by Kevin O'Brian published in the New York Times on 14th April 2009]

 

These days most web savvy organisations use some form of web tracking and/or analytics tool to monitor site traffic, statistics and visitor behaviour.

Recently there has been a lot of press about potential breach of privacy issues in Britain arising from the use of tracking tools such as Phorm, which can track a user's web browsing behaviour, and then use this information to deliver targeted advertisements back to the user which are categorised as being relevant or of potential interest.

The controversy around use of such technologies in Britain lies in whether they are in conflict with the EU's privacy rules which advocate that a person’s information can only be used with their prior consent.

Recently the UK government has been scrutinised for being laxed on enforcing privacy protection in line with EU law.

I suspect new announcements on this topic to follow shortly. I believe all web users and organisations with a strong web presence as well as vendors of web tracking and personalisation technologies should be diligent in ensuring that they keep abreast of any decisions to ensure privacy is correctly maintained.

Related Material:

The most widely known example of a potential breach of privacy in Britain is the trial of the BT / Phorm integration which allowed - Webwise to individually monitor and categorise the web use of individual BT broadband customers without their knowledge throughout 2006 and 2006. More information on this topic can be found in the aforementioned article and the related material provided below.