Posts by BT Customer

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

BT also failing to delete email addresses after customers leave

I left BT a year ago (oh bliss!) but all my email addresses stayed active despite my repeated attempts to delete them using portal, online chats and phone calls. My BT logins still work, my BT IDs still work, and while I've managed (eventually) to silence 8 sub addresses, the old primary is undeletable. BT are totally useless at responding to repeated requests to deal with this. 13 months on and the primary btinternet.com address is still fully active, receiving, forwarding and able to send emai using either pop3/smtp or webmaill. And of course - hackable (it's a btinternet.com address on the much hacked Yahoo!/Oath platform). After 12 months I finally lost patience. I made a subject data access request giving BT details of all my logins and IDs and asking for a full dump of my data. I got a very very partial dump which ignored most of my logins and email addresses that were still visible on the customer portal. I then sent the whole complaint to ICO and yes, they have failed under GDPR and there are just a few days left to the deadline ICO gave them. As Mrs May is wont to say, "nothing has changed" - it's all still active and they still haven't sent me my data.

If you have recently left BT - do make sure that they delete/inactivate your address and make a subject data access request to see what they "think" they hold on you. They probably won't be able to comply. Then shop them to ICO. If the ICO get a LOT of complaints about these incompetent ISPs then maybe at last they will issue some eye-watering fines that are big enough to dent their bottom line. Because they haven't done that YET despite some fairly major breaches by the likes of BT and TalkTalk and of course, Yahoo UK&Ireland/Oath.

Ad-blocker blocking websites face legal peril at hands of privacy bods

Hanff BadPublisher site closes

https://adblocking.think-privacy.com/ has closed.

@BadPublishers Twitter feed hasn't seen a post since June 2016.

It would seem that not a single legal comlaint has been filed by Hanff against any publisher. Hanff assured us all that his threat to file charges was not an "empty gesture".

http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/people-right-block-ads-people-breaking-law-publishers-ad-tech-industry/

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"This isn’t an empty gesture, says Hanff: “I’m going to start taking action. I’ve got the European Commission supporting me on this, I have regulators supporting me on this, and I will start filing legal proceedings within the next four to six weeks.

“I will be filing complaints to regulators in around eight to 10 member states initially, and then expanding that over time over the next 12 months to other regulators. My plan is to file complaints across the whole of Europe eventually.”"

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So what is happening? Has the whole thing quietly collapsed?

Re: Bull?

If Mr Hanff is referring to @blepharon as his Twitter "stalker" then I can categorically state that Bull (I've no idea who BULL is) posting above is NOT @blepharon (and that @blepharon is NOT a stalker).

Any futher unsubstantiated allegations he might want to make on that subject, should be backed up with verifiable evidence - I can certainly publish my own.

But getting back to adblocking - I'm not at all sure that the pics of the EU letter/email that we got given on twitter make it clear that detecting adblockers is illegal. ~IANAL - and neither is Mr Hanff.

1. The letter talks about what is allowed/not allowed, under the legislation, and that is not the same as saying that any unspecified model of adblock detection is illegal or legal.

2. It isn't the whole letter - when Mr Hanff has the time, it would be good to see a proper scanned pdf of the whole letter, available online.

3. It isn't an opinion from the advocate general or the ECJ following a specific test case, and is therefore not legally binding on anyone.

I'd love to see my version what I THINK the ePrivacy directive says actually enforced - but having personally been through 8 years of the blood sweat and tears of the Phorm campaign (where I worked very hard to support Mr Hanff for some years), as well as seeing no progress on StalkStalk (despite trying personally with others to pursue legal action against TalkTalk) or the interception of email by Google, Yahoo! UK&Ireland, BT, and the interception of web browsing by BlueCoat Systems/Verizon/Huawei - I am not easily persuaded that something IS illegal just because Mr Hanff SAYS it is, and that such "illegality" will actually be enforced by the national or European courts.

So far I've not actually SEEN any legal actions pursued to a conclusions by Mr Hanff on these or related matters, whether against Google, Safari, or others. Threats, rudeness, emotive personal opinions, but no actual court hearings with judgements.

My personal opinion? I use a HOSTS file, I use an adblocker, and I also use an anti "adblock-detector" greasemonkey script. I pay for content I value using a subscription model.

Why? Not primarily to protect my privacy although that is important - I don't like being tracked and I do my best to prevent it. But mainly because I don't trust ad-networks not to serve MALWARE onto my computer. Which is why I also run script blockers.

If I used a smartphone, I'd also be bothered about ads swallowing up bandwidth.

I'll wait for the further appearance of material next week on Mr Hanff's website ( http://think-privacy.com ?), as promised on https://twitter.com/alexanderhanff/status/723457388104286209 - is that the same material promised 5 weeks ago for the week beginning 14th March https://twitter.com/alexanderhanff/status/708326532075413504 ?

I doubt the answer will be found in legal threats. It will be inexorable pressure from ordinary consumers reacting by continuing to use adblockers, developing their own opensource tech to circumbent adblocker-detetion, and avoiding publishers who take measures that consumers find unacceptable -It's along time since I polluted my devices with Murdoch's brand of "publishing". That process is already happening and the ad-tech companies are losing (hence all the conferences they are sponsoring). Publishers who adapt to that reality can survive. The others? We can live without them.

Meanwhile - my advice is.. "follow the money" (on all sides of the argument).

Keep mentioning malvertising and bandwidth when publicising the issue.

Always ask for evidence.

Don't believe what people tell you unless they can back up their claims/allegations with evidence.

Yahoo! tries!, fails! to! shoot! down! email! backdoor! claim!

BT customers locked into BTYahoo email service

Just to make matters worse for long suffering BT customers, still stuck on BTYahoo email, BT are currently making it impossible for us to delete BTYahoo email accounts that we don't want. The online delete facility doesn't work (although it is promised that it will work by end of September - but that deadline has been and gone) - and BTYahoo have also made it impossible for BT customers to configure forwarding of emails to a third party address from their BTYahoo addresses. I understand that many of these problems also affect customers migrated to the new BTMail email provider Critical Path/Openwave. So - Yahoo suffer 500m data breach (not their first), we discover (again) that NSA are scanning our EU originated email data with Yahoo!'s backdoor assistance, and now they won't let us delete our email accounts?

Snafu! BT funnels all customers' sent email into one poor sod's inbox

BT messes up big time AGAIN.

I'm sure Mark Hughes of BT can explain it all next time he appears before a parliamentary committee. Meanwhile, we can wait for the ICO to wring their hands and do absolutely nothing about it. Again. Let's just admit it - BT's email is not fit for purpose - either the Yahoo! offering they are supposed to be ditching (and can't) and the new cloud offering called BTMail that is going badly wrong too.

They put DPI kit in the network for Phorm, their Beta forums leaked like sieves, they mess up their email migration, and now they send everyone's mail to a third party email address. Remind me again - how much were they fined for all this? Oh yes - nothing at all.

As compenation, can we have an interview about it on Channel 4 News with that nice Emma Sanderson please? For old Phorm's sake?

Ad slinger Phorm ceases trading

Delighted that after 8 years of lies, abuse, personally targeted criminal attempts to access my computer (unsuccessfully) via keylogger software originating myteriously and anonymously from Singapore-based mailservers, harassment by trolls, lies, cowardly libels, the scandal of ill-informed and inaccurate smear sites such as uninphormed.com and stopphoulplay.com, mysterious probes of my charity websites by Phorm, Police, Home Office, MOD, and a whole host of others, plus regular assaults on my privacy and reputation (including some of the worst coming ironically from a self-proclaimed "privacy advocate" who now has an offshore company registered in Belize), this particular part of the battle is over - but there is a lot more to be done to try and prevent further invasions of our privacy and interception of our communications by ISPs, ad-tech, multi-national corporations, ad-trackers, and mass unwarranted state surveillance. Sadly DPI interception of web communications by companies like BlueCoat Systems, and ISP surveillance such as TalkTalk Homesafe along with routine email surveillance by Gmail and Yahoo! have just become part of life, irrespective of what legislation says about bilateral consent. That has to change.

I've got to know some great friends in the campaign to rid the world of Ertugrul's Russian DPI poison - well done you people! I'll b cracking open some bubbly from a "Kent" vineyard this weekend to celebrate!