In the darker belly of the Internet world there are rumours that Phorm may replace ad’s by Google with it own ad’s… worried no of course you aren’t, after all Phorm is just the rebrand of 121media ( I think that was malware )
so what’s with the title of this post, well 70% or the UK internet users will have to opt out yes opt out, you see that Phorm as signed deals with BT, Talk Talk and Virgin, so now are you scared. if you thought that Zuckerberg’s Beacon was bad.. this is worse ..
well what could Phorm do
from the webwise site :
Advertising that’s relevant to your interests
Webwise assigns a unique, randomly-generated number in a cookie to a customer’s browser to preserve anonymity, then matches the categories of browsing activity with advertising. When there is a match the customer sees the more-relevant ad.
What if you where running adsense, they could just block that and replace it with a more relevant ad.
What if you where reading the FT and they mentioned Expedia and hotels in Paris, and phorm could add a link to lastminute if they wanted to or even a Banner ad.
What if the profile they built on you was leaked, I’m sure the UK are pretty good at not leaking Data ..
and what if when you searched Google you got Phorm ads and Not adwords, has and adwords advertiser that would piss me off ..
at the moment I can’t tell if the Webwise add on will deactivate the Phorm ads or not time will tell I guess.
btw BT just testing this on 10,000 people …
Bad peoples sites
http://www.phorm.com/
http://www.webwise.com/
related articles
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/internet.privacy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7280791.stm
DaveN
12 Comments
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26th March 2008 @ 18:36
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It’s not just google who should be worried. If this swaps out regular ads for their own lots of content providers are gonna miss out on ad revenue.
I think it’s wrong interfering with what the content provider wanted to be displayed.
26th March 2008 @ 21:29
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3
I agree doolally, but in the UK remove google UK from the mix and what do you have left ?
26th March 2008 @ 21:36
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4
Wow that sucks. In the article at Guardian, they suggested that you can, “turn off the monitoring by permanently blocking the cookie from oix.net…” Does the phishing security really matter all that much? I suppose it will scare a few into leaving things be but I’m sure many will be upset as well. Next firefox/ie extension perhaps (for the less tech savvy who don’t know what a cookie is)? You could call it PhormBlock or something.
26th March 2008 @ 21:39
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Yeah, you’re right Dave, there is not much left after taking google out.
26th March 2008 @ 22:57
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*** Next Firefox/IE extension ***
Ahem. Dephormation has already been around for quite a few weeks.
26th March 2008 @ 23:57
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Dave!!! At least my last 7 or 8 comments have vanished. Not funny now.
26th March 2008 @ 23:58
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As far as I’m concerned if I build a site to present a certain way with certain content then that is exactly what the end user should see. Right or wrong this is what the net is all about, they need to bang this sort of shit on the head and fast.
27th March 2008 @ 02:53
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Thats a very good point, how is this going to impact web designers?
What if they replace a standard 468 banner with one of those wanky Flash banners that fills half the screen when you roll over?
27th March 2008 @ 13:12
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10
It’s not just how it looks, people are going to lose money with this. Phorm will be making money from other’s content and the content provides will lose out.
27th March 2008 @ 21:46
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hm… as far as i know, phorm has no right to my data including what site i vist. join the fight and sign petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ispphorm/
29th March 2008 @ 20:20
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12
Dave - I’ve created a website at http://www.inphormationdesk.org/ aimed at intelligent non-tecchie computer users. Any feedback to improve the clarity or impact of the message would be very useful.
Neil.8th April 2008 @ 10:12
Copyright © 2004 - 2009 David Naylor. All rights reserved |
Phorm *is* illegal in the UK, under the terms of RIPA.
Companies that implement it owill pen themselves up to one huge shitstorm of legal action from their customers…