Just been snooping around with Phorm's (and Ke(u)nt's) history as 121media/Peopleonpage and quickly looked at whether VM's Pcguard recognises any as spyware and it does (peopleonpage) Also PCguard's Privacy Manager deletes cookies so any system based on that would be useless without explicitly trusting the cookie and if they did it for you then you've lost even more of your privacy.
The key point about Phorm's system is that it intercepts and analyses ALL the data (it has to to know what to profile) and without explicit consent or a court order this is illegal. I will never give my consent and changing the T&C's just will not cut it. There are already big legal questions over companies T&C's and EULA's and I very much doubt a court would agree that changing the T&C's to include that 'you give your consent for all your data to be snooped on' would be fair, however they word it.
The thing that gets me is that this technology of packet intercepting and analysis is not difficult to implement but the reason I see that it's not been done before is because it's wrong and illegal. Why didn't VM/BT/TT see this? Is Ke(u)nt such a good sales rep to pull the wool over their eyes with the BS about privacy? I can only think he is - but how do they feel now they know he's ph*cked them? Abused maybe...
The only thing that VM can do now is to dump Phorm (go on VM tell Phorm to go ph*ck itself). It would make financial sense, before their shares are affected (like Phorm's have been
) by the truth coming out regarding this system.