BT turned on "Web protect" for me
I checked my email this morning and... surprise! 🎉 BT had decided to enable a feature I didn't ask for, without asking for my permission. How exciting is this? (Answer: not at all exciting, it is infuriating)
Thankfully, they deemed my email server worthy of being accessed, which is why I could get my email using my BT line.
Information about this "protective" service is scarce on the control panel. It says it will show a warning when trying to access "suspect" websites:
How are they exactly planning to do that is particularly concerning to me, so I tried to dig in further into the details:
But there are no clarifying details on the 'details' section, and I still have so many questions.
- Who makes this list?
- Who decides what is "suspect"?
- How do you get "suspect" websites out of the list?
- How do you add exceptions?
- How are you going to show me this "warning"?
- Are you banning by IP?
- By domain?
- By port?
- Are you just looking at plain text content?
- Are you going to be rewriting the content displayed to my browser and other software used to access the internet?
- If you're rewriting this, where are you rewriting this?
- Where is this detection happening?
- What is the data retention policy [on the list of websites I have accessed] if this service is not run in-house?
- And if you rewrite content on the websites, what else can you do? Insert ads again? Is this a PHORM revival?
- And most importantly: Why?
😒