Assessing your phorm
Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ:
Media Post’s Daily Online Examiner looks at how ISPs are responding to the phorm threat:
Behavioral targeting company Phorm hasn’t launched yet, but is
already facing more pushback than even the staunchest privacy advocates
likely anticipated. The latest news is that Phorm opponent Alex Hanff
is calling for people to picket the annual meeting of BT — one of the
Internet service providers that’s working with Phorm.
“The purpose of the protest is to make BT shareholders aware of the
past and planned use of allegedly illegal interception technologies to
sell behavioral profiles to an ex-spyware company,” he
said, according to a report today in the U.K. paper The Register.
At the same time, an anti-Phorm petition in the U.K. has drawn more
than 13,000 signatories to date. The petition, stating that Phorm’s
plan “would result in the browsing habits of the majority of the UK
population being sold to a third party for advertising purposes,” warns
that “the opt out system for this technology is vague and unproven.”
“Surely this must be a breach of privacy laws, if not then the
privacy laws need to be changed to cover such invasive technology,” the
petition states.
These same arguments are increasingly surfacing here. Advocates say
marketers shouldn’t snoop on people’s Web-surfing activity to send them
ads without first obtaining users’ consent.
If behavioral targeting in general has raised advocates’ ire,
platforms that rely on data from Internet service providers especially
trouble privacy rights groups. That’s because ISPs know every site
users’ visit and every search query they make. Online ad companies
argue that the targeting is all done anonymously, so that companies
only know which sites particular users have visited, but not their
names or e-mail addresses.
But the prospect of ISP-based targeting is so troubling that
lawmakers have asked…