An article in today’s Sunday Times, highlighted by SpyBlog and Ben Goldacre has revealed what the Sunday Times describes as the “discreet monitoring” or “snoop(ing) on the habits of millions of EE phone customers” as they came out of London’s Oxford Circus station. In other words, EE were monitoring and recording the actions of their customers and giving the data to Ipsos Mori in what is, no doubt a potentially very profitable enterprise.
Ipsos Mori was delighted with the results. In a deal with EE — Britain’s biggest mobile phone company, formed in 2010 from a merger between Orange and T-Mobile — the polling firm had purchased the exclusive use of the phone data and the test run in central London had shown its potential.
There are some serious echoes of Phorm here.