[jelv]

I seriously wonder to what extent we can rely on law to defeat Phorm. We mustn't give up on that route, but I would suggest we should be making a parallel attack in a route that could prove more effective - undermining the profits to be made from the scheme by pimps such as Phorm.

This week an important step forward has been made in that BT have acknowledged the right of owners of websites to opt out of all profiling of visitors to their sites without having to exclude the search engines such as Google. We need to get thousands of websites doing exactly that. Individuals running hobbyist, small organisations or club websites I would think would be keen to prevent their websites being exploited in this way. I would have thought that any commercial organisation which was not intending to place advertising with Phorm (or similar companies) would be keen to exclude the possibility of their competitors adverts being promoted as a result of visitors to their own sites.

If we are to do this two initial steps come to mind.

1) We need an agreed standard statement that can be placed at the foot of the home page of websites joining this "league".

2) We need a website where we can register that we are opting our websites out. This should then be published as a list. If Phorm argue that they can't check the home pages to look for opting out text (which may vary) we can tell them to consult the list.

A key thing is to make it as simple as possible for website owners to join in with the campaign. If Phorm decide to ignore it I would hope it would give a good starting point for a class action.

If we could get a highly visible campaign going along this lines - it's the sort of thing that could easily start to snowball - I imagine it would start to worry the investors who would see hope of profits disappearing fast.