Phorm & Webwise

Dear customer

You may have heard that Virgin Media is currently working with a company called Phorm about the possible introduction of a technology called ‘Webwise’. Webwise is designed to help customers avoid scam e-mails or websites while, at the same time, making sure the advertising they see matches more closely their specific areas of interest.

Some customers have raised concerns about this technology and, in particular, whether it threatens their privacy by monitoring what they do on-line and the websites they choose to visit. As a result, we want to be as open and honest about what we're doing and clarify exactly what the state of play is in relation to any possible implementation of Webwise.

Virgin Media has signed a preliminary agreement with Phorm to understand in more detail how this technology works but we have not yet decided if it will be introduced. Webwise is a technically complex application which could be implemented in a number of different ways and it will be some months before we can confirm if the service will be made available to our customers and if so, how and when it would be deployed. Customer concerns around privacy and data protection are (and will remain) an important element of this preliminary evaluation and we will not roll out Webwise unless we are completely satisfied that in our view it complies with applicable data protection and privacy regulations.

It may be that, as part of the evaluation process, we want to test the technology among some of our customers but we are not currently doing so and we will not conduct any such tests without individual customers' prior consent. Moreover, should Virgin Media eventually decide to roll out Webwise, customers will not be forced to use the system.

In the meantime, we'll continue to communicate our intentions openly and transparently. If we go ahead with deployment, we will let all our customers know before rolling out the Webwise solution and will clearly explain how the system works and what it means for them.