I see that the snide pro-Phorm campaign against those pointing out the way that Phorm and the UK government failed to protect our privacy, for profit, is in high gear.

I note also that the somewhat mendacious claim that Phorm is no worse than Google, is still being trotted out.

Google tracks only where you visit sites that are using google tracking, or reached by using google search. And google’s server spiders clearly identify themselves to site owners, and can be blocked using the ROBOTS.TXT file or equivalent tags.

Phorm tracks your entire internet access, and refuses to identify their spider to site owners.

Phorm is not, as some claim, equivalent to standing outside the shops in the high street handing out leaflets… it is the equivalent of following you all day into and out of every shop you enter, listening to your conversation with the shop-keepers (whose consent has not been obtained), and then handing out leaflets based on the results of that snooping.

Interestingly, even under RIPA, IOCA and all the other mistaken recent legislation, the government obtain data on your web access beyond the basic of which sites you access

Phorm’s system also spiders the websites – their failure to provide (and honour) a unique identifier for their spider means that there is no way for the shop-keeper to prevent them scraping the site’s content short of blocking all search engines – a clear refusal by Phorm to allow a simple and informed opt-out by the shop-keeper.

Finally, when the accusations of dishonest behaviour by Phorm’s opponents are noised about, let’s remember the background of Phorm’s originators, in 121Media – their previous attempt at performing user tracking… by installing products classed as SPYWARE (http://www.f-secure.com/sw-desc/peopleonpage.shtml) and ROOTKITS (http://www.f-secure.com/sw-desc/apropos.shtml) on users’ machines with deliberate mechanisms to prevent users from removing them.

Finding that these mechanisms were increasingly coming under legal pressure, they’ve changed tack (slightly) and are now trying to perform the same kind of abusive tracking, but bypassing the need to install spyware directly in the user’s machine.

But since the intended effect – snooping on a conversation between two people, with no informed consent by one of them – remains the same, their nasty little operation remains just as abusive and intrusive as ever.

Oh – and when it comes to snidey comments in copyright, it may be that http://www.phormdesign.co.uk/
may feel that phorm has a case to answer….

My final thought is this – the “stopphoulplay” site does indeed “rebuild phorm’s reputation” – but it doesn’t change it.

It merely builds up the fact that we are dealing here with a company that thinks that it has the God-Given right to monitor other people for profit, and which turns dowright nasty when other people question the morality and legality of that business model.

https://nodpi.org/2009/05/06/phorm-prove-they-have-no-respect-for-privacy/