Terrible Phorm

Phorm, for those unaware and they're doing their best to keep people that way, is all about advertising; at the moment, when you see a banner on a website, it might have some degree of targeting towards you but more often than not it'll be for some random product or service that you have no interest in. What Phorm does initially sounds quite promising, it means that as long as the sites you visit are all signed up, you get specifically targeted adverts. If it sounds slightly insidious then that's because it is, but that isn't the whole story because there's the question of how the advertisers know which banners to place and that comes down to deals that Phorm is trying to arrange with the various UK ISPs, BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk; what they essentially want to do is insert their systems within the link between the user's computer and the outside world in order to gather data on what that user is viewing. To placate people they're saying that the data would be collected anonymously and that they're only interested in trends, so if a significant number of users visit a site that sells decorative cakes and later go to somewhere selling fancy dress, there's the assumption that more users would do the same if they were aware of the fancy dress site and Phorm's clients can therefore target advertising on the cake site.

So what's so bad about that you might ask? Well it's not so much the idea of targeting adverts (although that in itself is rather insidious but it's been happening for years now), but there is a huge questionmark over the whole concept. The basic model seems to be that when a user's browser puts out a request for a new site, that request gets side-lined by Phorm's hardware, anonymised and stored - the request isn't passed on and instead they're relying on the way that web browsers automatically send another request if the first gets misplaced for some reason - in other words, Phorm are in ur internets, reading ur HTTP requests. Is that a problem if it's anonymous you might wonder, but the question is more a case of can we trust marketing people to stick to those particular guns or even to have the guns out in the first place? All we will have is Phorm's word that they're not keeping far more data than they're claiming and there's very little that we or even the people at the ISPs can truly keep a tab on what is and isn't going through their virtual T joint. Or indeed what comes out on the way back to the user, again there is only Phorm's word that they won't tamper with the results of searches to inject their clients into results favourably and it wouldn't take much work to actually achieve that.

If the company had a spotless or at least a relatively clean history this would still be an issue of some concern, but Phorm seem to have a consistent record of attempting to conceal or suppress the truth around their endeavours; a Wikipedia article about them was ham-fistedly edited by someone directly involved to remove true but possibly damning information, trials have been held of the system in the last six or so months that saw tens of thousands of BT broadband customers monitored without their consent or even awareness and most attempts to get information out of them regarding the system and it's uses rarely gets more than a "no comment" unless it's someone like the BBC in which case the PR drones come out in force. If that weren't enough to make people suspicious of the company, the fact that they were previously called 121media and produced, amongst other things, adware should set off a cacophony of alarm bells. They even claim that different logged-in users will be treated independently so goodness only knows how much actual data is being harvested.

The Phorm "service" (for want of a better word) will be "opt out", in other words users will have to be aware that their browsing is being monitored in the first place and that they've got to do something in order to prevent that happening - that is assuming, of course, that opting out actually works and, considering 121media's previous connections with dubious advertising techniques, the idea that the Phorm opt-out works just like the unsubscription addresses on most spams (or in other words it just confirms that you're there to be advertised at rather than getting you removed from anything) wouldn't be hard to accept. If anyone wants further information, there's always BadPhorm and the aforementioned Wikipedia article, although i'll add the usual disclaimers about Wikipedia and not taking it as gospel at this point...