Corporate social spy tool to come to Aus?

It could be a year before a controversial British Telecom social-networking spy tool goes commercial, but big business is already interested.

Privacy advocates in the UK were angered at trials of the DebateScape tool that allowed BT and some of the country's biggest firms to monitor websites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs for derogatory comments against them.

The tool dispatches comments to a target recipient at a company that can contact customers about their remarks.

BT global services vice president Neil Sutton said it is unclear if the tool is legal in Australia, as it is in more "liberal" countries including many across Europe.

"The interest is very considerable. Companies love the idea of how they can get into the social-networking environment, understanding what people are doing, and how to respond to it," Sutton said. "We work with a number of major organisations, if there is a lot of interest we will ... make it available on a global basis.

"The challenge with any contact centre solution is that it is not bound by geography. We may touch Australia."

Trials are testing the disparity between comments detected by DebateScape and the actual beliefs of the writers, which requires secondary research for verification purposes.

Sutton could not say if users were standing by or reneging on their online comments, but said "come back in a year" when the customer trials will be completed.

BT has compared the eavesdropping tool to overheard conversations in a pub, since the comments it detects are on publicly-accessible web pages. The telco's customer services managing director, Warren Buckley, defended the system to the Daily Mail, saying it has helped some 30,000 people and garnered a positive response from customers, even if they are initially sceptical.

Darren Pauli travelled to Hong Kong as a guest of BT.