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It's not yet clear whether Virgin Media have got beyond the negotiating stage. Their newsgroup support staff have been adamant that no practical steps have been taken to implement Phorm/OIX. There's already a backlash starting. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/25/phorm_isp_advertising/ The British may have more CCTV cameras and people on a national DNA database than any other country, but we tend to take the view that what happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors. That includes use of the Internet, even if, realisticly, complete privacy never existed. The idea of letting a company run by Kent Ertegrul who was the founder of PeopleOnPage, a company that produced software that has been described as spyware and a rootkit, sift through large amounts of, if not all, unencrypted web traffic to profile you, no matter how supposedly anonymously, does not sit well with a lot of British Internet users. AOL knows what can happen with supposedly anonymized personal data. We also should have some protection by being in the EU. There are two relevant EU directives that have been enacted into UK law - the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002. The former covers the collection and retention of personal data. The latter governs how ISPs must behave to have limited liability; the UK has no common law concept of "common carrier." These could be used in a possible legal challenge to this highly intrusive concept.