David Evans wrote that: "A bunch of lunatics ranting about privacy are trying to prevent ISPs monitoring user connections, profiling them and then intervening by serving advertising. Do they not understand that the ISPs are simply trying to improve the customer experience? The extra revenue would be spent on much-needed infrastructure upgrades." (iPlayer piling on the pressure on worried ISPs).

I sincerely doubt the ISPs are trying to improve the customer experience. As far as I recall, Phorm - the company at the heart of this reference - is working with a couple of ISPs with a product that will use deep packet inspection to intercept and read your personal traffic between you and the web sites you are reaching, which is itself of questionable legality.

The company promises faithfully that it will ignore personal data and just extract keywords which will be used to provide targeted advertising. One has to simply trust this company.

If such a company were involved in, say, adware deployment or perhaps rootkits, one might take a different view. The analogy often quoted asks how you would feel if all your personal mail were opened, scanned, resealed and the data used by the postman to select which  advertising flyers you should receive. Of course, the   postman promises not to  actually read anything.

Do you really think it is  lunacy to be concerned?

John K, submitted on the web