7 comments

• Pete, 15th July 2009.

  I want to see BT directors jailed for the trials in 2006, 2007, and 2008.
  
  Phorm is industrial espionage, copyright theft, and mass personal communication surveillance.
  
  Grease the wheels? I don't want it at all. I want privacy/security/integrity from my communication services providers... that's what I pay them for.
  
  Not spyware.
  

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• Mike, 15th July 2009.

  Phorm is spyware in the network which no anti-spyware software can eliminate. We don't want it.
  

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• Midnight_Voice, 15th July 2009.

  Targetted advertising has two aspects for the consumer.
  
  The back end is serving the ads. Done well, I have no problem with this. Done badly, I have AdBlockPlus to shield me.
  
  But (and here is the big but) the potential problem is the front end. How do they know what to target me with?
  
  If they are Phorm, they look (or would have looked, as we now hope Phorm is in the past tense) at everything I do online - everything, with me having next to no control over what they can and can't see - in order to build a profile so they can serve me appropriate targetted ads.
  
  That's just massive overkill, quite beyond the intrusiveness.
  
  Amazon, however, offer me recommendations, based on what I've bought from them, and what I choose to tell them about my likes and dislikes. That's a service to me, and I'm free not to use it, or to lie to them for amusement, or to use it honestly and benefit from its suggestions.
  
  Google is somewhere in the middle of all this. Probably a bit too intrusive, at the default settings, but I can subvert this with a little effort, if I choose too.
  
  So, to summarise: I see nothing wrong with targetted advertising per se, and indeed enjoy what Amazon provides.
  
  The whole issue is the profile gathering; and the profile gathering side is what Phorm got wholly and unacceptably wrong, damn and blast them to hell, and good riddance.

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• Martin, 15th July 2009.

  100% agree with Pete

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• Phormaverse, 15th July 2009.

  I may not like BTA very much but I wouldn't campaign against it as long as it is done openly and with proper informed prior consent. What gets my blood all "angried up", is my ISP intercepting and profiling all my internet traffic so it can make a fast buck out of BTA, and being so underhand about the whole thing.
  
  I particularly don't like them lying to me or other customers, which seems to have been part and parcel of this whole Phorm saga, from the days of the covert trials right up to an exec trying to mislead me and others in the Houses of Parliament on 6th July this year, by claiming to have "kept the ICO fully informed at every stage" - even though they didn't bother telling them about the covert trials till the ICO found out through other sources in the spring of 2008.
  
  Everyone is very excited about RIPA and mobile phones - but where were all the MPs when BT was found out snooping on tens of thousands of its customers? No one wanted to know. And still no one is in jail for that particular bit of snooping.

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• DennisCB, 15th July 2009.

  Going into partnership with Phorm could only lead wholesale customer rebellion. Those who failed to see it coming should be fired. Supplying customer information to these people was repugnant to say the least. Illegal trials, illegal government participation, and the illegal and very public derailing of a regulators ruling and police enquiry was never going to win the hearts and souls of any idiot's customer base. I hope the European Commissioner's enquiry into the criminals involved is both far reaching and very, very robust.
  

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• Jonathan, 16th July 2009.

  Terrifically argued one and all - what a learned, passionate and tech-savvy readership we've got here.
  
  Conversely, the deafening lack of response from Phorm fanciers suggests that they exist only in the minds of marketing gurus.

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