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BBC changes privacy policy

by Nick Beck | 10.02.2009
Cookies used for the BBC website track users’ IP addresses and postcodes which were used to deliver weather reports, local news and other content dependent on location. Members of an internet privacy forum noticed last September that the site had been sending data to Visual Sciences, a web analytics company. Visual Sciences were taken over by Omniture – an online marketing firm – in 2007However, with nothing in the BBC’s privacy policy telling browsers that’s what was going to happen with the cookies, complaints were made. One of the members of the forum who raised the issue said: said: “Information given to Omniture included my IP address , my country, my postcode, the dates and times I visited the site, the news stories I read and details of every news video clip I watched. You could derive a great deal of information by mining that data”