Hi all
Apologies for recent absence - as per some news stories that have broken over the past few hours, we are pleased to be able to release the interim Privacy Impact Assessment that we've referred to in interviews and our live chats on Webwise. Simon Davies, Managing Director of 80/20 Thinking, conducted the Privacy Impact Assessment with his colleague Gus Hosein, who is Visiting Fellow, Information Systems Group at the London School of Economics.
The Privacy Impact Assessment is a review of Phorm systems and policies. Since this preliminary, initial report was written several weeks ago, we have addressed several claims in it. Among them, we have confirmed to 80/20 Thinking that Webwise does not track behaviours across sensitive sites; that anonymous cookies cannot be traced back to users; and that Webwise deliberately ignores "https" pages used by banks, and other personal data. We will work with 80/20 Thinking on an ongoing basis throughout the year to complete the assessment and ensure we confirm our leading privacy standards.
In the press, Mr Davies has openly commented: "In our view, Phorm has implemented privacy as a key design component in the development of its system. In particular, Phorm has quite consciously avoided the processing of personally identifiable information." In particular, Mr Davies told BBC News: "Phorm does advance the whole sector of protecting personal information by two to three steps."
To avoid the re-emergence of prior confusion: Privacy International, one of the leading privacy advocacy bodies, did not endorse us and do not endorse any companies. We engaged Mr Davies (founder and director of Privacy International, though not acting in that capacity to produce the report) because of his expertise and experience. He has spent decades railing against infringements of privacy. We expect that he and his team in a consulting capacity would apply the same intellectual rigour to their assessment of companies that they do in campaigning for privacy rights.
As a consultancy, 80/20 Thinking conducts audits for companies and it charges a fee to do so. Audits take time and resources, as the one conducted by Ernst & Young (View report PDF), and we haven't yet found a free audit service that is worth our trust or anyone else's.
We await a date for the final Assessment to be issued and will update this page when we know.
The full interim report is at
http://www.phorm.com/user_privacy/pr...act_report.php and you can ask questions on the site too