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-   -   Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797] (https://www.cableforum.uk/board/showthread.php?t=33628733)

isf 08-03-2008 23:38

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by popper (Post 34503002)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012101340.html
IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says
**********


Big surprise, German politicians pushing for more overreaching tech laws. If it's possible to track users by IP why do all search engines set identifier cookies? And tell me which individual is personally identified by 0x7f000001 ??? :dunce:

Search engines are opt-in services and IP address may be attached to but are not themselves personal data. Phorm propose to intercept all web requests without explicit user permission. Web page requests are likely to contain significantly more privacy sensitive information than whois entries for domain names or static IP assignments; and I don't care that they claim not (yet) to be logging this information.

The only thing of note about this article is that if our ICO don't take action over phorm, the EU are going to have a field day.

popper 09-03-2008 00:25

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by isf (Post 34503087)
Big surprise, German politicians pushing for more overreaching tech laws. If it's possible to track users by IP why do all search engines set identifier cookies? And tell me which individual is personally identified by 0x7f000001 ??? :dunce:

Search engines are opt-in services and IP address may be attached to but are not themselves personal data. Phorm propose to intercept all web requests without explicit user permission. Web page requests are likely to contain significantly more privacy sensitive information than whois entries for domain names or static IP assignments; and I don't care that they claim not (yet) to be logging this information.

The only thing of note about this article is that if our ICO don't take action over phorm, the EU are going to have a field day.

thats the point of posting it, the EU IC states IPs are personal data, the UK are in the EU and subject to its laws etc.

you opt-out,its been said time and again,the data gets sent as far as the profiler at least, so they are subject to handling and collecting at least, as regards the UK IC DPA.

as they now say this data wont get anonymised and then passed along, so its still got the IP and other potential legally defined personal data inside.

http://www.dataprotectionact.org/4.html
data collection (as in sending to the profiler)


When handling, collecting, processing or storing personal data, ensure that:
a) all personal data is both accurate and up to date
b) errors are corrected effectively and promptly
c) the data is deleted/destroyed when it is no longer needed
d) the personal data is kept secure at all times (protecting from unauthorised disclosure or access)
e) the Data Protection Act is considered when setting up new systems or when considering use of the data for a new purpose. Note that this may affect the existing registration with the Data Protection Authority
f) written contracts are used when external bodies process/handle the data explicitly specifying the above requirements with respect to the data
It is equally important NOT to:
a) access personal data that you do not need for your work
b) use the data for any purpose it was not explicitly obtained for
c) keep data that would embarrass or damage YOUR-COMPANY if disclosed (eg: via a subject access request – see below)
d) transfer personal data outside of the European Economic Area unless you are certain you are entitled to or consent from the individual concerned has been obtained
e) store/process/handle sensitive personal data (see below) unless are certain you are entitled to or consent from the individual concerned has been obtained

---------- Post added at 23:25 ---------- Previous post was at 23:10 ----------

btw i just took the url from above someone else posted, on closer inspection its not an official UK/ICO site, infact its housed in the US.
http://www.who.is/whois-org/ip-addre...ectionact.org/
so to get a better understanding of the exact UK/EU meaning, read the act, or put some effort in an find a better UK source...

Kursk 09-03-2008 00:26

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto (Post 34502952)
And that is the big rub.....

Other ISP's have been in talks, they are just waiting to gauge the response from the so-called Big 3 ISP's.

The grass may be greener on the other side, but if its managed by the same farmer in the future....why move? :)

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke) :)

mainlime 09-03-2008 01:03

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Does anyone else find it suspicious that Simon Davies, 80/20 Thinking and Privacy International are all strangely quiet on this?

Toto 09-03-2008 01:05

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Shaun (Post 34503029)
However for the admins/mods here to track that IP to me is very very difficult, for my ISP - not so hard. :)

EXACTLY!

If Phorm don't have that information passed to them, AND the ISP's trace data on an individual IP address date and time....then it isn't personal information.

Traduk 09-03-2008 01:46

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
The discussion on IP's is IMO central to the underlying issue in everything we do on the internet and the guardianship of the final unravelling of the difference between a code giving ISP and customer number at a coded geographic area and the account holder's name and address is entrusted to the ISP. It could be reasonably believed that the ISP's would only yield to pressure to reveal the actual account holder if criminal activity had taken place on the IP and a court order obliged them to break confidence with the account holder.

Trust that our ISP will behave totally responsibly is a fundamental basic requirement in our relationship with our ISP and I believe that whether perceived or actual, the ISP's are behaving as though their responsibility can be sold for thirty pieces of silver. It of course may be that within the confines of data protection laws etc they have stopped short of a breach of the laws of the land but they are without doubt displaying a cavalier attitude towards the trust placed in them by customers. Once trust is lost it is almost impossible to regain.

Phormic Acid 09-03-2008 03:03

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by bigbadcol (Post 34503066)
If it is deleted after a few hours then it must be stored. Somthing that has been denied most strongly over the past few days.

I also think Phorm’s claim that no information gets written to disc is probably rather misleading. When people look at their computer at home and think “where am I going to store 500GB of data?”, the answer will be “on a hard disc.” If you’re a business, this isn’t necessarily so. You could get something like the Gear6 CACHEfx.

Gear6 satiates hungry apps with 500GB RAM monster

I’m not suggesting Phorm will be using that. They’ve probably built their own storage system using standard parts.

Phorm have only got to store textual pages. So, not memory-hogging images and videos. Let’s assume the average HTML page is 100KB in size. You could get around 5 million pages into 500GB, allowing for storage overheads.

Many big pages contain a lot of junk. They’re generated on request, using things like PHP. They’ll contain the same code snippets over and over again, lots of white space or even large numbers of HTML comments. That could all be stripped out prior to caching. It could be as simple as stopping passing on the stream when a ‘<’ is reached and starting again on the next ‘>’. You might want to collect the alternative text for images. That would add a bit of complexity, but there’s no reason why it can’t be done in real-time within the stream, saying using some FPGAs.

If you strip out all the crud, you might get down to an average of 25KB per page. Then, you’d get around 20 million pages into 500GB of RAM.

isf 09-03-2008 03:34

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by popper (Post 34503098)
you opt-out,its been said time and again,the data gets sent as far as the profiler at least, so they are subject to handling and collecting at least, as regards the UK IC DPA.

as they now say this data wont get anonymised and then passed along, so its still got the IP and other potential legally defined personal data inside.

My complaint has always been technical, that opt-out should be at the network level per subscriber and requests from those who opt out should never reach phorms anonymiser or profiler. So I followed your advice and put some effort in, skimming both the DPA and 2002/58. Indeed, any ISP seriously considering the current opt-out phorm system needs to hire a legal team who understand "legal stuff".

Alternatively ISPs could allow subscriber opt-in at layer 3; avoiding the legal and technical issues with phorms value-subtracting service entirely.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto (Post 34503125)
EXACTLY!

If Phorm don't have that information passed to them, AND the ISP's trace data on an individual IP address date and time....then it isn't personal information.

The web page itself may be, where the user is logged-in or has an active session.

Quote:

If you strip out all the crud, you might get down to an average of 25KB per page. Then, you’d get around 20 million pages into 500GB of RAM.
:erm:

Or they could scan for keywords and only store association data... who am I kidding? Based on the design of the rest of the system, phorm are probably doing it exactly like you say ;)

BloodyL 09-03-2008 03:46

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
The Telegraph online thinks we should Shut up or pack up!

mogodon 09-03-2008 04:01

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Mebbe if I was paying "£9.99 a month" {Telegraph} I would be a little more accepting of Phorm (though probably not)!!

As it is I pay £37 a month for 20MB which isn't exactly cheap and now VM want more money.

BloodyL 09-03-2008 08:28

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Precisely, not only does the article fail to take into account the expensive tiers, it also comletely ignores the technical ramifications that this whole debacle has unearthed.
Oh, and he also pulled out the good old Google gambit, which you guys have nailed down so succinctly with the "at least Google is an opt-in concept, if we don't want to use it we don't have to!" notion.

flowrebmit 09-03-2008 08:42

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Not only that but Google doesn't track every page that we visit, so family home pages and photo albums for example are unlikely to have been surfed to via a search engine.

dav 09-03-2008 09:17

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
One thing I was reading on ElReg was the interview with Phorm where they claim that using this piece of tosh will actually reduce online advertising in the future.

OK...hard to believe, but there you go.

Later on, the statement is made that people who don't use this piece of tosh will still be bombarded with ads. How can these two statements correlate?

If websites are going to realise that targeted ads mean that they can design their pages to incluse fewer ad banners, surely they won't go to the trouble of designing two versions of the same page; one targeted with 4 or 5 ads and one untargeted with 20 ads?

PhormUKPRteam 09-03-2008 09:57

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Hi all
I will try and work through some of the points raised above, but if any of these answers fall short on the technical front (I am but a humble comms person) then feel free to drop a line to techteam@phorm.com
I wil try and post up individual posts for each point rasied.

dav 09-03-2008 10:00

Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by mainlime (Post 34503124)
Does anyone else find it suspicious that Simon Davies, 80/20 Thinking and Privacy International are all strangely quiet on this?

Yes, I would like to ask him if HE would be happy to have HIS ISP adopt the Phorm system.


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