Who's your internet provider?
 

I hope it's not BT, Virgin Media or Talk Talk.

The above mentioned providers have apparently reached agreement with Phorm to sell your surfing destinations to enable them to target advertising more specifically at you.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02...a_summer_2007/

The company mentioned Phorm have gone through several name changes in their time - not surprisingly since they apparently have their roots in spyware.

Scary! Thanks for the "heads up".

I'm glad I'm not with one of those three.

Can one block Phorm in any way?

I do believe they have to give you the "option to opt out" .......

Luckily, however, I don't use them..... but I suspect if it's an earner then it won't be long before the others join in.

Ugh. But there is something you can do: run Firefox, with a couple of plugins:
- AdBlock Plus, plus the Filterset.G Updater
- NoScript.

The last mentioned gives you control over Javascript, which is how this Phorm stuff works. By default, nothing runs, but you can set it so that scripts always run if they belong to the site you actively went to,and 3rd-party scripts are blocked - which suits GMail etc.

Phorm may not last long.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03..._fipr_illegal/

If you go to http://webwise.bt.com/webwise/index.html It tells you if it's switched on or not or as in my case that it's not available in my area.

They very craftily tie it up with a so called security feature

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter if you opt in or out.
The system only appears to check for the presence of the opt out cookie *after* your browser request has gone through the profiler. So all you actually opt out of are the targeted ads. Phorm still get the marketing data.

Was with BT, now have the MACs for my 2 accounts and actively looking for a principled ISP.

The closest real world analogy to what they are doing is having your postman open all your mail, read it through for keywords and seal it back up so he can better target you with more relevant junk mail. Obviously totally acceptable :rolleyes:

Make no mistake, even if you have logged in to PPRuNe, any posts you make here are on an unencrypted (non-HTTPS) page and would be included in the profiler, as would any mail you checked via web-mail.

Edited to include last 2 paras

I agree it's totally unacceptable I believe that some people who have been caught by it are planning to sue BT, I await the outcome with interest.

Yes, the people that are looking at suing BT were business customers!
When approached about it, BT outright lied that they were anything to do with the anomalous browser behaviour these guys noticed.
Add to that, I think it's under the DPA, trialling a system on live customer data is illegal.

I'm awaiting responses from Aquiss and IDnet regarding their policy regarding Phorm. Zen, so far, seem to be the only one that have stated they will have nothing to do with it.

Out of interest, I contacted my ISP, www.plus.com about "phorm".

Within a short time, I received this e-mailed reply:

"Dear P.P.,

Thank-you for your query. We have no plans to implement any of Phorm's technology in any capacity.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Regards,

Plus.com"

P.P.

Thanks P.P.

Aquiss, Zen, Seriously!, Fast and Entanet (I guess that means their resellers too) have publicly stated they won't have anything to do with this.
IDnet have just called me back and confirmed the same. :D

Happy (unprofiled) surfing to all :ok:

I'm with Orange/ex Freeserve are they doing this? Hope not. I uderstand it's an intrustion of my human rights.

daz

it may be a breach of the data protection act but it certainly is not a breach of your "yoomin roights"... :ugh:

As a BT customer you can see why I was concerned enough to start this thread. Of course as has been said upthread (is that a word?) where BT go today I'm sure others will follow- if they get away with it.

There is a thread currently running on a BT support forum http://www.beta.bt.com/bta/forums/th...art=0&tstart=0

where this is being debated. It is very much up to date and BT staff do contribute. However if you were to read through it, and unfortunately it's over 20 pages long, you'll find that the staff have been frequently contradicting one another and Phorm employees contradicting them.

Staff have been caught out lying in the thread too.

It appears that BT have been less than honest about the whole matter.

What is interesting to note is that the trials that were due to start on the 12th of March in Some areas of London have not in fact done so.

In response to my query, have been informed by my ISP (Madasafish) that they "have no intention of using Phorm". I have previously had direct dealings with the lady who gave me this promise and she has always been reliable in the past.

Mostly reassured by this but I cannot put out of my mind that Maaf were recently bought out by BT although they do still seem to be operating independently.

Well, I've just managed to get throughthe entire thread on the BT website referred to above. The obvious solution to all the concerns being aired there is "find another isp". My isp, as I have posted above has categorically stated that they have no intention of incorporating Phorm, however, as was pointed out on the BT website, plus.com is now owned by BT. Althought it would appear that they have managerial independence at present, for how long?

P.P.

There is a good article about this in this months Computing Which? It would seem that the Information Commisioner's Office is now involved, requesting info from Phorm and from the three ISP's so far involved (BT, Virgin Media, and Talk Talk). Talk Talk it would seem is the only ISP to indicate that its customers will need to opt in rather than opt out. The Consumers Association is also to be involved in discussions about Phorm.

So far my ISP (Orange/Wanadoo/Freeserve) does not seem to be involved.

And now Talk Talk seems likely to be the one to buy Tiscali (my ISP).
Oh B*gger.....

Phorm.

...a company run by and employing some folks with a very checkered past... is attempting to take advantage of ISPs' lust for advertising dollars, and setup a centrally controlled system (spanning not only ISPs, but countries) that is designed to capture, analyze, and retain information about the browsing histories and behavior of hundreds of millions of individuals. On top of that, the system is designed to deliver content to and redirect browsers based on very fine grained channel rules. It is not only a wet dream for targeted advertisers, but for government agencies and hackers as well. Which is of even greater concern give that the software for the system is the product of Russian developers and Phorm has said that ISPs aren't given access to the source code.

But Phorm promises that their system won't store or use personal information. Honest.
So we don't need to worry about that then, do we? :sad: