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