06 February 2009 | Author: O. Gaywood Media Optimiser

BBC changes UK data collection after complaints

Fresh off the back of their attack on Google Latitude, privacy critics have chalked up a win after forcing the BBC to drop a tracking system from its UK website.

Cookies used for the BBC website track users' IP addresses and postcodes which were used to deliver weather reports, local news and other content dependent on location.

Members of an internet privacy forum noticed last September that the site had been sending data to Visual Sciences, a web analytics company. Visual Sciences were taken over by Omniture - an online marketing firm - in 2007.

However, with nothing in the BBC's privacy policy telling browsers that's what was going to happen with the cookies, complaints were made.

One of the members of the forum who raised the issue said: said: "Information given to Omniture included my IP address, my country, my postcode, the dates and times I visited the site, the news stories I read and details of every news video clip I watched. You could derive a great deal of information by mining that data.

"Given that the BBC is supposedly licence-funded in the UK, there was no justification for it to provide an online marketing/behavioural targeting company with this data. For purely statistical purposes, the BBC has its own system."

This is not the first time Omniture has been involved in controversy. In early 2008 the company's reputation was tarnished among internet privacy watchers because of the way Adobe software was collecting data.

The Beeb has now stopped sending data from bbc.co.uk or from UK visitors to bbc.com and has amended the privacy policy for international users.

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