Quote:
Originally Posted by PhormUKPRteam
Hi all
PhormUKPRteam here again - further to recent speculation on the coverage of Phorm patents: a patent is not a blueprint. The Phorm Webwise system has been designed from the ground with privacy at its heart. Patents are designed to help inventors protect their ideas. They do this by describing every different approach that could be taken so as to give the inventor the broadest definition of the idea and improve the chances of preventing anyone else from copying it. The systems we roll out will have much more focussed functionality than that described in the patents. And it will preserve the highest standards of online privacy
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The purpose of a patent is to reserve the right to do a certain thing in a certain way, and to prevent others from doing the same, so whether you like to admit it or not, in filing this patent you are reserving the right to potentially collect data on us in the future through wider means that you have so far announced (e.g. monitoring of data on ports other than port 80), and to diversify the ways in which you currently plan to target advertisements at us (e.g. interstitial pages - aka- inserting extra full page advertisments
between the pages that we have actually requested through our ISP). Even if this is not your intention right now, things change, so you'll forgive us for not believing everything you tell us, since we've been given no choice about the installation of your hardware in our ISP so far. I'm sure you understand that the best hope for those of us who are fundamentally opposed to your plans is to prevent this system ever getting off the ground. Once it's running, it'll be much harder for us to get it shut down, and it'll be much easier for you to implement incremental changes to the software that will further erode our privacy.