phormfree

Cops back in on BT/Phorm case

2010-05-17T10:02:00.001+01:00

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has called in City of London Police to assist as it decides whether to go to court over BT's covert trials of Phorm's web interception and profiling system.

The City force ran the original criminal investigation into the trials, which saw tens of thousands of BT customers' broadband traffic monitored without their knowledge or consent. The idea of Phorm's technology is to monitor users' behaviour at the ISP level in order to serve them appropriate adverts later. Privacy campaigners consider that this is worse than the tracking cookies already used for such purposes as the user has no visibility of the process and can gain control over it only with the ISP's assistance.

The City of London force declined to discuss its renewed role in the affair today. The CPS said the Square Mile cops have come back on board to assist in ongoing inquiries related to details around its original investigation.

It was claimed by privacy campaigners and legal commentators after The Register revealed the secret trials that BT and Phorm had committed offences under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which restricts covert wiretapping and interception of communications.

A file of evidence was handed to City of London Police, but detectives halted their investigation in September 2008 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/bt_phorm_police_drop/). In a statement they argued that no criminal offence had been committed because they perceived no criminal intent by the two firms.

Subsequently Alex Hanff, now of Privacy International, wrote to the CPS asking for leave to bring a private prosecution, which prompted the current inquiries by prosecutors.

A CPS spokesman today declined to comment on when a decision over prosecution might be taken.

The prosecution service has previously stated that it is considering expert opinions on the matter. The Register understands it has had some of this expert material on file since January.

Phorm announces Navegador for Brazilian ISPs

2010-03-26T12:14:00.001Z

Phorm said it has signed deals to profile with five ISPs in Brazil. It will launch what it described as "the first phase of a country-wide roll-out" with Estadão, iG, Oi, Terra and UOL. Phorm will also deploy its content targeting system, Webwise Discover, branded as "Navegador".

According to the most recent statistics available from the International Telecommunication Union, there are more than 67 million internet users in Brazil, about 34 per cent of the population.

As was planned in the UK, Phorm will profile internet users' interests by intercepting their traffic and looking for keywords in the web pages they visit. It acts as an exchange, allowing advertisers to target individuals based on what they have recently browsed. The targeted ads will be served up on publisher sites which sign up to the exchange.

Chief executive Kent Ertugrul said: "Beyond Brazil, we have successfully completed two trials in Korea".

500 Days of Silence

2010-02-24T00:00:00.001Z

Extract from nodpi.org...

It has been 500 days since Alex first asked the CPS for permission to bring a private prosecution against BT and Phorm for illegal and covert mass communication interception.

In that time, the CPS have been silent.

Before writing this post I asked the CPS to provide me with a statement. This is the statement they provided in full.

A CPS spokesperson said:

“The Crown Prosecution Service is working hard to review the evidence in this legally and factually complex matter. We have requested and received technical and expert evidence, some of which we have only recently received, and which is being very carefully considered. We are currently awaiting advice from a senior barrister which we will review before coming to a conclusion. We are giving the matter meticulous attention and will reach a proper and considered decision as soon as it is possible for us to do so.”

In those 500 days no action has been taken against Directors of BT or Phorm. Despite overwhelming evidence of illegal mass communication interception, computer misuse, fraud, commercial copyright infringement, data protection violations, and even failure to file documentation at Companies House.

Phorm UK Waves Goodbye to another Director

2010-01-12T08:05:00.001Z

UK Phorm, which controversially worked with UK broadband ISPs (e.g. BT WebWise) to monitor what websites you visit for use in targeted advertising campaigns, has lost another member of its team as non-executive Director Stefan Allesch-Taylor steps down from their Board of Directors with immediate effect.

The Board apparently thanked Mr Allesch-Taylor for his contribution to its "development" over the last twelve months and wished him well in the future. Happily, for privacy campaigners at least, Phorm has gone rather quite after it was unable to cement support for its service. Major backers BT , Virgin Media and TalkTalk appeared to shelve adoption plans during the middle of last year.

Phorm posts $15m loss in H1 2009

2009-09-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

Phorm, the controversial ISP-based behavioural targeting company, has revealed operating losses of $15m (£9.28m) for the first half of 2009.

Phorm – which has endured setbacks in the UK this year with ISPs BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk moving away from deploying the service – said losses for the first six months to 30 June 2009 fell from $24.7m (£15.3m) in the same period last year.

This year BT said it had no immediate plans to deploy the technology, Carphone Warehouse cancelled its contract and Virgin Media said it was delaying use of the technology (nma 8 July 2009).

Kent Ertugrul, CEO of Phorm, said the company remains optimistic about its progress in the UK. “We’re in discussions with a number of UK ISPs and remain optimistic about our longer term potential in this market,” he said.

However, he added the company sees South Korea as its next growth market. “We’re in the final stages of a large-scale market trial in partnership with KT, the country’s leading ISP, the results of which are now being evaluated,” said Ertugrul. “The trial involved the participation of leading local ad agencies and publishers, with targeted advertising being served to participating Korean internet users.”

The statement followed the resignation of chief technical officer Stratis Scleparis, who was responsible for developing Phorm’s technology. Before Phorm he held the same role at BT Retail. A spokesman said Marc Burgess, senior VP of technology, will now lead its technology development.

The company has also closed its Stopphoulplay.com website, launched to “hit back at the ‘privacy pirates’ smear campaign against Phorm”. It has also closed the dedicated sites for its behavioural targeting products, Open Internet Exchange and Webwise, and has redesigned Phorm.com.

Ex-BT tech chief quits Phorm

2009-09-18T11:20:00.000+01:00

Stratis Scleparis, the former BT Retail chief technology officer who joined Phorm after overseeing secret trials of its web monitoring and profiling system, has quit the firm.

Phorm is expected to reveal further heavy losses when it announces its half year financial results on Monday.

A spokesman for Phorm said Scleparis had resigned earlier this month as CTO "to pursue other interests". Marc Burgess, the firm's senior vice president of technology, will take on his responsibilities.

In a statement, Scleparis said: "I am proud of the contribution that I and my team have made in the development of Phorm's unique online content and advertising personalisation technologies.

"I wish the Company every success with its current market trials and the roll out to full deployment of its innovative service."

Phorm CEO Kent Ertugrul thanked him and wished him well.

Scleparis played a central role in the covert trials of 2006 and 2007, when tens of thousands of BT subscribers' web browsing was intercepted and profiled without their consent. He joined Phorm in October 2007, weeks after the second trial finished.

During his tenure, The Register understands the system has been subject to major reengineering, including development of a network-level opt-out in line with UK ISP demands.

None of these now has any plans to use the technology, however. The secret trials led to deals with BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk in February 2008, but following a customer outcry, all are now moribund. Scleparis' departure will be seen as a further blow to Phorm's earlier hopes of UK deployment.

The firm has recently repositioned itself as a provider of targeted content as well as advertising, and is concentrating on ISPs overseas. It has conducted small scale testing with Korea Telecom and claims to be in talks in several other markets.

Meanwhile, the European Commission said this week it is still considering the UK government's response to a formal notice of legal action. In April the Commission said the lack of enforcement action over the secret trials showed the UK had not properly implemented European privacy laws.

Phorm shares hit by OFT investigation

2009-08-20T15:13:00.000+01:00

Shares for targeted internet advertising firm Phorm were hit hard today after the Office of Fair Trading announced that it will begin a full-scale investigation into the use of personal information for online marketing.

Phorm's software stores information on the sites web-users visit so that they can be targeted with advertising on other pages.

The technology has been met with protest from privacy campaigners, concerned about the invasiveness of the information stored on individuals.

Today shares in the company sank 25p to 105p, a loss of 19%, as investors chewed over the potentially damning ramifications of the OFT's investigation.

The OFT said the investigation will 'evaluate which advertising and pricing practices are most detrimental to consumers.'

Its research will also look into hidden incremental costs and misleadingly offers.

It has been a hard slog for Phorm this year after several high-profile names ruled out the possibility of using its software.

Last September the City of London police announced that they had completed an investigation of Phorm and found no evidence of illegal activity, paving the way for the new ad targeting trial to begin.

But since, TalkTalk has followed BT move last month to end trials of Phorm's information-storing Webwise software. And the European Commission has recently begun an infringement proceeding against Phorm following extensive discussions with experts and numerous complaints from users in the UK.

The upshot is that Phorm's share price has taken a severe battering. It has shed 100p or 50% in the month since mid-July, a mammoth 370p since May, and 795p over the past 12 months.

Phorm responded to this loss, accounting for nearly 90% of its share value, by insisting that there remains a great deal of potential for expansion outside the UK.

In July the company said: 'Phorm has been focusing considerable effort on faster moving overseas opportunities to drive a first deployment of the Company's Webwise and Discover technology.

'The Company continues to make excellent progress and is actively engaged in more than 15 markets worldwide including advanced negotiations with eight major ISPs of which three are engaged in trials.'

However, the subsequent withdrawal of BT, Virgin and Talktalk from negotiations has had a negative impact on investor sentiment, each time driving share prices lower.

TalkTalk drops ad tracking firm

2009-07-08T11:41:00.001+01:00

UK internet service provider TalkTalk has pulled the plug on its agreement with online behaviour tracking firm Phorm.

It follows news earlier in the week that BT had no immediate plans to use the service.

Phorm has developed technology which collects information on web use in order to better target adverts but it has proved extremely controversial.

The loss of its key partners saw Phorm's shares tumble by more than 50%.

Phorm said that TalkTalk, the second biggest broadband provider in the UK behind BT, had ended its agreement with the firm.

TalkTalk's plans were not as advanced as BT which had undertaken three trials of the technology.

"The directors note that this relationship had not extended to any form of trial in contrast to BT and some international internet service providers," a statement from Phorm read.

It also noted that "privacy was not a factor" in BT's decision to pull the plug on the technology.

Virgin Media, which also expressed interest in the system, was still reviewing it, according to Phorm.

Phorm is currently trialling its software with South Korea's largest ISP and is in discussion about the use of the technology with ISPs in 15 other countries.

Shares in Phorm slumped a farther 13% following the announcement.

BT drops Phorm targeted ad service after customers cry foul over privacy

2009-07-06T11:51:00.000+01:00

BT has quietly ditched a controversial system that tracks the internet habits of its customers, developed by the technology firm Phorm, which has been attacked as online snooping by privacy campaigners. BT was a key player in the development of Phorm's Webwise system, which uses information about which sites an internet user visits to target them with relevant advertising on subsequent pages.

It carried out secret tests of the technology in 2006 and 2007 which are now the basis of a European commission investigation into the UK government's failure to protect its citizens online. Last year BT carried out a proper consumer trial of Phorm's technology. The results have been keenly awaited, not just by management at Phorm – whose chairman is former chancellor Norman Lamont – but by its other two potential partners, Virgin Media and TalkTalk.

But BT has decided not to proceed with rolling out Webwise to its 4.8 million broadband customers, dealing a heavy blow to AIM-listed Phorm. The company, which has received complaints from customers about Phorm, said the decision was down to its need to conserve resources as it looks to invest £1.5bn in putting a next-generation super-fast broadband network within reach of 10 million homes by 2012. Privately, however, BT bosses have been increasingly concerned about consumer resistance to advertising based on monitoring users' online behaviour and specifically about the backlash against Phorm.

"We continue to believe the interest-based advertising category offers major benefits for consumers and publishers alike," said a spokesman for BT. "However, given our public commitment to developing next-generation broadband and television services in the UK we have decided to weigh up the balance of resources devoted to other opportunities.

"Given these commitments, we don't have immediate plans to deploy Webwise today. However, the interest-based advertising market is extremely dynamic and we intend to monitor Phorm's progress …before finalising our plans."

The news will throw the spotlight on Virgin Media and TalkTalk, which recently snapped up rival internet service provider Tiscali. Between them, BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk control about three-quarters of the UK broadband market.

Virgin Media is understood to remain interested in the concept of behavioural targeted advertising, not least for use with its video on demand service, and is in talks with a number of potential technical partners. But the internet service provider is understood to have cooled on the idea of using Phorm's technology.

TalkTalk, meanwhile, has said it is keeping an eye on Webwise but any implementation would have to be done solely on an opt-in basis – customers would not be automatically connected to the service – and the company currently has no time–scale for deployment.

A spokesman for Phorm said BT's decision was not the end of the world, not least because it has been expanding overseas and is now in talks with potential ISP partners in 15 other countries. This year the company announced a trial of its technology with KT, South Korea's largest ISP, and another overseas deal is expected to be announced shortly.

"It is not a great surprise to us, to be honest. It has been a long process and we have never had a definitive date on a launch," said a spokesman. "Phorm is not just dependent on a UK model with one ISP."

But it is the latest in a series of setbacks for Phorm, which has become something of an internet industry bete noire. Amazon recently "opted out" of Webwise, saying it did not want traffic to its websites monitored by ISPs that sign up to use the technology. Google and Bebo are also considering opting out, potentially depriving Phorm of crucial information about internet users' tastes.

The UK government is also understood to have opted its domain names – such as www.direct.gov.uk – out of Webwise amid concerns about privacy. Although ISPs, media companies and even some politicians see Phorm as a way in which UK companies can claw back some share of the internet advertising market from the clutches of Google, the web's creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has criticised it as unjustifiable online snooping.

Phorm shares fall as BT opts out

2009-07-06T11:44:00.000+01:00

Shares in the online ad firm Phorm have fallen by more than 40% after BT said it had no immediate plans to use the service that tracks online behaviour.

Phorm serves up adverts related to a user's web browsing history, which it monitors by taking a copy of the places they go and search terms they look for.

However, it came in for considerable criticism from privacy groups and prompted an EU investigation.

The firm's shares were down 43.16% at 270p at 13:13 BST.

Phorm builds a profile of users by scanning for keywords on websites visited and then assigns relevant ads.

It has proved controversial because it scans almost all sites a user visits and there is an ongoing political debate about how a user gives consent.

Phorm had conducted trials of its technology with BT, which it marketed as Webwise.

On hold

A spokesman for British Telecom, Mike Jarvis, told the BBC that they were not completely closing the door on Phorm's Webwise service.

"We're interested in this area [targeted online advertising] but for now we have no immediate plans.

"It's more a case that we have other stuff to work on - Project Canvas, rolling out the fibre network and so forth - so we've taken a step out of Phorm and will see how it develops.

"[Our decision has] nothing to do with cost or privacy, it's about resources and priority," he added.

In April, Amazon blocked Phorm from scanning its web pages to produce targeted advertising, as has the UK government, citing privacy concerns.

Phorm declined an interview request, instead issuing a statement saying its activities "remain ongoing" and that it was looking forward " to creating the conditions necessary for UK ISPs to move to deployment".

"We continue to focus considerable effort on faster moving overseas opportunities," the statement read.

"In so doing we have already minimised our dependency on the deployment by any single ISP or in any particular market.

"In addition to making excellent progress in South Korea, we are engaged in more than 15 markets worldwide including advanced negotiations with several major ISPs."

Earnings: Phorm burning through £1.1m a month

2009-06-18T12:01:00.001+01:00

Who says the dot.com days ever ended? Phorm is reducing its cash burn to a hefty £1.1m a month, after clocking up 51% higher annual operating losses of $49.8m in 2008 - all without yet having any income from anything but interest. Costs boomed in the second half of the year but the company claims to have gotten on top of things in Q4.

What on earth is Phorm spending on? The PDF tells us - $7.1m went on research and development, but the biggest cost category was $42m in 'sales and administrative expenses', including $26.6m in staff costs - salaries grew to $15.7m and severance compensation was $3.6m, mostly after scrapping the US-centric directors board.

The company raised $65m through share placements in March 2008 and finished 2008 with $23.2m cash in the bank. But that evaporated to just $12.8m by this May 31, so it had to raise another $24.2m earlier this month. Until then, chief executive Kent Ertugrul's stake was 18.78%, he was the only director-level shareholder listed.

Phorm says the investment will help it "move forward to commercial deployment in the UK and Korea whilst providing funds to support our business development efforts with ISPs in other markets". In other words, it's spending big millions to support itself in the hope it can shake off its reputation. It now reckons it "has adequate resources to ... continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future".

The outfit says it has "engagement with ISPs in 15 markets, including eight of the top 10 globally", but - beyond the completed BT (NYSE: BT) trial, ongoing Korean trial and the on-hold agreements with TalkTalk and Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) - there are no other details, only: "Although considerable time has elapsed between announcements with our ISP partners, much work continues to be done in the background.

Virgin tells customer: we've dropped Phorm

2009-06-17T09:26:00.001+01:00

Virgin Media is writing to customers to tell them it has dropped controversial web advertising service Phorm - even though it hasn't.

Peter Bayliss, a reader of PC Pro's sister title, Micro Mart, wrote to Virgin to complain about the company's plans to deploy Phorm's Webwise system.

Mr Bayliss received a prompt written reply from Virgin's "customer concern" department, assuring him that the cable provider had severed all ties with Phorm.

"After much consideration, Virgin Media decided not signed up [sic] for Phorm because of amongst other things, the Webwise ad monitoring system," the letter reads.

"The roll-out of Phorm's Webwise technology has been dogged by controversy following news that large well known telecoms company ran two trials using the software without seeking its customers' permission in 2006 and 2007," the letter adds.

"Virgin Media would have offered an an [sic] 'Opt In' option to it's [sic] customers in relation to Phorm's Webwise but decided not to sign up in any way," the letter states.

However, a spokesman for Virgin Media claims the letter has been sent out in error and that the company's relationship with Phorm is unchanged. "There has been no change in our position," the spokesman told PC Pro. "We haven't committed to Phorm or pulled away from it either."

Asked to explain why the company's customer services department was sending out such letters, the spokesman said: "we haven't issued any instructions [about Phorm] to customer care." Virgin said it would issue fresh guidance to its customer support staff.

Virgin Media is one of three British ISPs who have agreements in place with Phorm - the other two being BT and Carphone Warehouse - but none has yet to commit to a full rollout of Phorm's Webwise technology, which uses deep-packet inspection to target ads at users.

American "Phorm lookalike" NebuAd bites the dust

2009-05-21T00:00:00.000+01:00

NebuAd, a US "behavioural advertising" company in the Phorm mode has come a cropper, writes Martyn Warwick.

A document quietly filed with a Californian court signals the demise of the company that, a year ago, was covertly tracking the web browsing habits of 10 per cent of the US population.

The company used its deep packet inspection technology inside various ISPs (more than 30 of them at one time) and its response to the deluge of complaints it received when it became generally known that the software was eavesdropping in secret on Internet subscribers was to say that its ISP "partners" always and specifically notified their customers before setting the spyware in action.

But little good it did in the end. The company foundered on the reefs of public disquiet and after the US Congress voiced serious concerns about NebuAd's methods. ISP's, worried about churn and possible class action lawsuits withdrew from "partnerships" with NebuAD, leaving it high and dry.

Lawyers acting for what's left of the company say it is to assign its remaining assets to creditors and is to "cease to exist as a going concern."

NebuAd collapsed because the company's claims that ISPs "always and invariably" explicitly notified customers that the web browsing proclivities were about to be monitored turned out to be untrue.

And, although the company did provide a cookie-based opt-out facility and claimed that all data was anonymised, the US Congress, via the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, questioned the legality of NebuAd's secret deep packet inspection technology and the probity of the company's top management.

The company's CEO, Bob Dykes was accused of "beating consumers" and "data-pimping". This was followed by an official "request" for all US ISPs to hold in abeyance any behavioural advertising systems they may have been using or intending to introduce.

Last August, NebuAd sacked many of its staff - an exercise described by management as "temporary adjustments in the headcount" - and insisted that it was business as usual. However, a few weeks later the company was forced to admit that it had "laid off all its officers and employees."

During last autumn, 15 people who had unwittingly been targets of NebuAd's covert surveillance went forward with a court case alleging wire-tapping, packet forgery and the hijacking of browsers.

It transpires that NebuAd had been "deliberately and actively" injecting fake packets into responses from websites to deliver cookies to users PCs. A practice lawyers for the group of disgruntled subscribers describes as "packet forgery" and "straightforward browser hijacking".

NebuAd also did itself no favours with the authorities by point blank refusing to talk about its technology, opt-out processes, how long its retained consumer data, how that data was manipulated, its privacy and confidentiality regimes (or lack of any such thing) and whether or not those snared by the company could access, change or delete their profiles.

Furthermore, NebuAd's only patent is for a system to forge packets and replace a website's banner ads with NubuAd's own.

The case continues over the battered corpse of NebuAd.

Government response to petition 'ispphorm'

2009-05-19T15:29:00.004+01:00

The Government’s response to petition 'ispphorm'

(see http://www.phormfree.com/2009/03/petition-to-stop-isps-from-breaching.html)

Thank you for the e-petition on internet advertising technologies and customer privacy.

As your petition states, some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been looking at the use of Phorm’s Webwise and Open Internet Exchange (OIX) products. However, the only use of the technology so far has been the trials conducted by BT.

Advertisers and ISPs need to ensure that they comply with all relevant data protection and privacy laws. It is also important that consumers’ privacy is protected and that they are given sufficient information and opportunity to make a clear and informed decision whether to participate in services such as Phorm.

The Government is committed to ensuring that people’s privacy is fully protected. Legislation is in place for this purpose and is enforced by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). ICO looked at this technology, to ensure that any use of Phorm or similar technology is compatible with the relevant privacy legislation. ICO has published its view on Phorm on its website:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/pressreleases/2008/new_phorm_statement_040408.pdf

ICO is an independent body, and it would not be appropriate for the Government to second guess its decisions. However, ICO has been clear that it will be monitoring closely all progress on this issue, and in particular any future use of Phorm’s technology. They will ensure that any such future use is done in a lawful, appropriate and transparent manner, and that consumers’ rights are fully protected.

FirePhorm extension for Firefox

2009-05-08T12:00:00.001+01:00

FirePhorm is an extension that can add Phorm opt-out cookies to web-page requests to avoid storing a Phorm tracking cookie for each web site you visit.

Firephorm avoids Phorm webwise.net redirects and protects your preference to opt-out from the Phorm Webwise (proxysense) system from being overriden.

FirePhorm can modify http request and response headers to add Phorm webwise-uid opt-out cookies to web-page requests and strip them from responses.

FirePhorm also provides the option of ‘poisoning’ Phorm’s test data by opting-in with a tracking uid number that is constantly changing.

FirePhorm extension for Firefox: http://www.firephorm.com/

Webwise Exclusion Email Address

2009-04-27T10:46:00.003+01:00

Send an email to website-exclusion@webwise.com to request that your website is not scanned by Webwise.

Excluding Webwise Using Robots.txt

2009-04-27T10:41:00.002+01:00

How are robots.txt files handled by Webwise?

The Webwise system observes the rules that a website sets for the Googlebot, Slurp (Yahoo! agent) and "*" (any robot) user agents. Where a website’s robots.txt file disallows any of these user agents, Webwise will not profile the relevant URL. As an example, the following robots.txt text will prevent profiling of all pages on a site:

user-agent: * disallow: /

The following example will restrict profiling of a directory named "images":

user-agent: Slurp disallow: /images

The system will request the robots.txt file from the root of the host e.g. www.domain.com/robots.txt. When requesting the robots.txt file, the system will follow up to 5 redirects. If no robots.txt file or an HTTP error is returned, if the returned file is not in single-byte ASCII (ISO-8859-x) format, or if the file size is greater than 50Kbytes, then the URL will be marked as allowed for profiling.

Website owners should note the following aspects of the Webwise system’s interpretation of robots.txt files:

Malformed robots.txt files will result in the URL being disallowed for profiling.
Any of the well-established line-termination tokens are interpreted as a newline, i.e. DOS, UNIX, old-style MacOS linefeeds. Multiple linefeeds are ignored.
Web-encoded URLs are decoded and handled as normal.
Variable capitalisation within the robots.txt file is converted to lower case and processed.
The system does not support Google extensions to the robots.txt standard.

Webwise Opt Out For Web Site Owners

2009-04-27T10:32:00.003+01:00

I own a website which contains private/sensitive information which I don't want to be scanned by Webwise. What can I do to achieve this?

While the privacy safeguards built into BT Webwise mean that sensitive or private content on websites is not compromised, the system also offers a number of mechanisms by which website owners can prevent pages being profiled if they wish. Website owners may implement any of the following methods:

HTTPS: No HTTPS traffic passes through the system or is profiled
Standard HTTP password-protection : Pages protected using standard HTTP password protection, as defined by RFC 1945, will not be profiled
robots.txt: The Webwise system will observe the rules that a website sets for major search engines using the robots.txt method. If the website's robots.txt file is set such that "*" (any robot) is not permitted to crawl it, then Webwise will not profile its pages.

Alternatively, you may request specifically that your website is not scanned by Webwise. To request that your website not be scanned by Webwise, please email: "website-exclusion{at}webwise.com".

How To Disable Webwise

2009-04-27T10:22:00.002+01:00

I delete my cookies regularly, and I want to keep Webwise switched off. How do I do that?

If you regularly delete your cookies and want to ensure that Webwise is permanently switched off, add "www.webwise.net" to the Blocked Cookies settings in your browser.

To block cookies in Internet Explorer 7 (windows xp)...
Tools (menu) >> Internet Options (menu) >> Privacy (tab) >> Sites (button) >> enter "www.webwise.net" in the address field then click on the Block button.

To block cookies in Firefox 3 (mac)...
Firefox (menu) >> Preferences (menu) >> Privacy (tab) >> Exceptions (button) >> enter "www.webwise.net" in the address field then click on the Disable button.

Please add a comment if you can provide instructions for other browsers.

TrackMeNot extension for Firefox

2009-04-27T09:11:00.002+01:00

The TrackMeNot extension for Firefox by Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum protects users against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search engines.

Features include:

Firefox 3.x compatibility
Realtime Search-Tracking
Dynamic URL/Header Matching
Burst-Mode (default: off)
Cookie-Anonymization (default: off)
Improved Timing Mechanism
Improved Logging (cookie-actions, etc.)
French language version
Improved support for non-latin characters
Selective click-through (for non-ad links)
RSS support for seed-generation and substitution
Burst-mode (default: on) with query permutation

TrackMeNot extension for Firefox: http://www.trackmenot.org/

Blocking Phorm won't stop it, warns privacy group

2009-04-27T00:00:00.001+01:00

Open Rights Group says opting out is not enough
Rosalie Marshall
vnunet.com, 27 Apr 2009

A data protection group has warned that opting out of Phorm will not prevent the technology from processing data that users enter through web site search portals.

Companies such as Amazon, Wikipedia and LiveJournal have taken the decision to block the controversial advertising technology from scanning their sites because of the privacy implications.

However, Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock has since admitted that, even if web sites opt out of the programme, ISPs supporting Phorm will still be able to profile users visiting those sites.

"This is because Phorm can scan search requests entered in those sites, even if it cannot detect the web site pages users are viewing," Killock said.

"For example, even if Google opts out of Webwise, when a user types in a Google query and they are using BT, it will still go through Phorm before it reaches BT."

Killock added that Phorm does not gain permission from either senders or receivers of the information before it processes the data.

Phorm uses browsing information to serve accurately targeted advertisements, and is soon to be rolled out under the Webwise brand by internet service providers BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk. However, as the time for deployment nears, the controversy surrounding the technology only seems to be increasing.

Most recently Phorm came under attack from the European Commission (EC), which argued that UK government authorities are running foul of European Union privacy and data protection laws by not taking action against telcos that use the platform.

The EC's move initially prompted the Open Rights Group to call on large technology firms to opt out of Phorm by sending an email to Webwise.

"While we recognise that an opt-out is an entirely second-rate way of dealing with this problem, we would strongly urge you to take advantage of it in order to immediately reduce the risk of harm to your company and to your customers," said the Open Rights Group.

FirePhorm.com

2009-04-26T14:38:00.003+01:00

TrackMeNot.org

2009-04-26T14:36:00.001+01:00

Webwise.com

2009-04-26T14:19:00.000+01:00

Phormfree.com

2009-04-26T14:18:00.000+01:00