A complaint from Privacy International, about Virgin Media’s plans to use a piracy gauging tool, has kicked off a scrutiny from the European Commission (EC) into Virgin Media’s use of the contentious network traffic monitoring system.

With Virgin Media almost set to use the controversial CView tool, developed by Detica, for keeping an eye on the web habits of its users, the privacy advocacy group has warned a legal action against the company it goes ahead with the plan.

Alexander Hanff, the group’s head of ethical networks, said that the group will challenge Virgin under the RIPA act for illegal interception, just as it did with Phorm.

The Privacy International group has been opposing Virgin’s prospective use of the monitoring tool ever since the idea was first suggested in November. At that time, the group had said: “The global watchdog organization Privacy International today expressed its deep concern at the revelation that Virgin Media is about to commence a trial of Deep Packet Inspection technology by Detica, known as CView.”

Meanwhile, noting that Virgin would use the CView “openly and transparently” to scan almost 40 percent of its traffic, in an attempt to find out the extent of piracy across its network, a company spokesperson elucidated that the monitoring tool works at a core-network level; and it neither identifies nor stores individual data of the users.