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Originally Posted by SMHarman
So thus far the analagy stands but the difference is the opt in or opt out aspect at a transactional level. Not the fact you are passing transactional data.
Though the supermarket sends you tailored offers and decides shop layout and promotional advertising that will appear in your store based on this data. You could say the store is doing it's best to shove ads in your face as you walk around. Wait until Tesco change their cards from barcode cards to RFID cards that will be read as you walk around the store.
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Do Tesco send all their transactional data to a company run by people with a known history of morally repugnant and debatably legal behaviour? Do they use methods which differ from criminal behaviour only in so far as they are sanctioned by the ISP in question without referral to those whose personal data is being mistreated in this way? Do they send it to a company with roots in a country which has a deserved reputation for online crime and fraud, who process it on servers located in a country famous for repression and no privacy legislation at all? Do they take the information whether you want them to or not, and only allow you to "opt-out" of whether you receive the "benefits" of their data mining?
Equating supermarket clubcards with this is very wide of the mark.
This Phorm company is run by a guy who admits with no apparent trace of guilt to have been involved in installing adware and rootkits on users' systems without their knowledge in order to give them unwanted pop-up adverts (google PeopleOnPage for details. Both Symantec and F-Secure have this company listed as "spyware").
The technology is nothing short of an ISP-sanctioned man-in-the-middle attack, which if perpetrated by anyone other than an ISP would be illegal in most European countries, and may well in any case be illegal.
As far as I understand it, exporting personal data to other countries is in any case illegal unless an explicit opt-in (NOT out) has been obtained under the Data Protection Act. Phorm's excuse that they "anonymise" the data appears extremely flimsy according to those who have had a good look at what their system proposes to do.
It appears that the "opt-out" is purely that you will not have targeted adverts - your data will still be processed by these servers whether you have opted out or not.
Even if the above were not the case, there is absolutely no benefit at all to the end user of this technology. It will add lag to your connection, provide "phishing protection" which is already built in to Windows if using Windows and available free from other providers if not -
without having adverts shoved in your face. It adds no value at all to their service and sells everything you do online to people who have no business looking at it - is that really what you want?