Cable Forum - View Single Post - Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]

Traduk · 05-04-2008, 02:24

I would agree that most web users are likely to roll their eyes at techy or legal arguements regarding what Phorm intend to do but there are simplistic ways of making the point.

A lot of people, especially the younger amongst users value their privacy and would react positively if they were told that the system is designed to "look over their shoulders" and "spy" on what they do and then "profile" them and feed back against that profile adverts determined by analysis. Tell the average teenager that their parents (assuming same access group and rights) can see what advert profiles have been generated by their offspring by virtue of delivery and a major driving force behind technology is going to become extremely anti spying in any Phorm.

I have not posted on this issue for quite a while because the spin on words from Phorm and their PR people is repetitive and boring. The rubbish about no retention of data is inconsequential because what has been retained is an analysed profile from the data viewed. What they have is only of value when married up with their anonymous acronym but as the acronym and the user's IP can be married up by accident or intent then they have spied to obtain and retain a profile on a user. Indeed they may not have retention of the original data beyond the time taken for analysis but the product of that data is retained for the system to work.

Does anybody have PingPlotter traces saved from between the national outage on Dec 21st 2007 and the commencement of this thread. I had a lot of speed and surfing problems during that period and magically speed has increased back to very pleasing levels since this thread gained legs. I wish I had saved the pingplotter traces from that time because what drove me to use OpenDns, Treewalker, and Bind in a vain attempt to get reasonable DNS resolutions has long gone.

05-04-2008, 02:24	#2371
Traduk Inactive Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 312	Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797] I would agree that most web users are likely to roll their eyes at techy or legal arguements regarding what Phorm intend to do but there are simplistic ways of making the point. A lot of people, especially the younger amongst users value their privacy and would react positively if they were told that the system is designed to "look over their shoulders" and "spy" on what they do and then "profile" them and feed back against that profile adverts determined by analysis. Tell the average teenager that their parents (assuming same access group and rights) can see what advert profiles have been generated by their offspring by virtue of delivery and a major driving force behind technology is going to become extremely anti spying in any Phorm. I have not posted on this issue for quite a while because the spin on words from Phorm and their PR people is repetitive and boring. The rubbish about no retention of data is inconsequential because what has been retained is an analysed profile from the data viewed. What they have is only of value when married up with their anonymous acronym but as the acronym and the user's IP can be married up by accident or intent then they have spied to obtain and retain a profile on a user. Indeed they may not have retention of the original data beyond the time taken for analysis but the product of that data is retained for the system to work. Does anybody have PingPlotter traces saved from between the national outage on Dec 21st 2007 and the commencement of this thread. I had a lot of speed and surfing problems during that period and magically speed has increased back to very pleasing levels since this thread gained legs. I wish I had saved the pingplotter traces from that time because what drove me to use OpenDns, Treewalker, and Bind in a vain attempt to get reasonable DNS resolutions has long gone.