Peer protests BT's Phorm trials

Protester Stephen Mainwaring was one of the people affected by the 2007 trial. Mainwaring said that he had noticed his PC was connecting to a site called 'sisip.net'.

"Every site I was visiting would connect to that site; there would be a redirect, indicated in the status bar in the bottom-left-hand corner of my screen," said Mainwaring. "I phoned BT and said: 'Why am I connecting to sisip.net?' They told me I must have a virus."

Mainwaring said he scanned his computer and could find nothing wrong, but continued to be redirected. He escalated the problem within BT's support network but was continually told he "must have a virus".

Mainwaring found that sisip.net was hosted by 121Media, which became Phorm. At the time, 121Media was being accused of foisting spyware on innocent users, so Mainwaring said he "feared the worst" — that his computer could have been infected. He purchased a new computer system. That system encountered the same problems, and BT continued to insist he had a virus. Then he found out that BT had been holding exploratory talks with 121Media to set up a platform, and finally that BT had conducted the trial.

"Once BT admitted that the trials had been going on, I was horrified because it had a major impact on my business," said Mainwaring, who runs his own horse-racing statistics company. "I had to shut down for three days. I went and bought a brand new PC off the shelf. I have to comply with the Data Protection Act and, when this was going on, I had to assume the worst — that customer data had been compromised. I was so worried I couldn't sleep for three nights, thinking I'd have to close my business and lose credibility. What got me annoyed was BT saying I had a virus when the problem was on the ISP side."