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Originally Posted by Jayceef1
The problem is that peoples perception has been coloured by all the chinese whispers on this and other forums made by people with their own unfounded interpretations of what phorm is designed to do. This fiction then "becomes fact" in peoples eyes and the hysteria continues.
You could also argue that because the company was allegedly involved in spyware previously it would be the ideal company that could prevent it going forward as a "poacher turned gamekeeper". Someone as already suggested in the VM newsgroup that they use someone like that to test it.
The information that Phorm would use is probably the least likely of anything used by anyone else to capture personal info. You are at far greater risk elsewhere on the net.
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Whatever the past misdeeds of Phorm and whatever their current merit (and I'm not convinced of that, by the way, I'm just being charitable), the fact is, privacy and freedom are two of the most jealously cherished attributes of the internet. Any suggestion of tracking usage, and worse, actually *using* the data thus collected, no matter what 'safeguards' are put in place, was always bound to lead to 'hysteria' as you call it. They should have seen it coming. Actually, they probably did, hence their signing up a megabucks PR agency to spin it for them.
I feel bound to point out, that any system which relies on human compliance for its security is flawed by design. The very fact that Ernst and Young *need* to check to ensure it's not being abused, demonstrates that is capable of being abused. And as surely as one person's stupidity can lead to 25 million child benefit records going astray, sooner or later that abuse, whether by accident or with malice, will occur.
Never underestimate the willingness of large corporations to resort to nefarious tactics when they think their bottom line is at stake. Sony and rootkits comes to mind - and were it not for the vigilance of one extremely accomplished blogger, we would still be completely oblivious to that.