A Summary of Where My Thoughts Are Now - feel free to ignore!
Remember there is a LOT of money involved. If Webwise is worth £85m pa to VM that equates to about 150,000 customers, so they probably won't mind losing a few. Phorm still has a market cap of £200m despite the recent stock tanking. And unfortunately most people are like sheep and will probably remain oblivious or soon forget about the whole thing.
I think the only thing that will keep VM from implementing is the fear that directors will go to jail. And believe me, even if there is only a very slim chance of that happening it does concentrate the mind wonderfully. But the chances are very very slim indeed - just look at recent rail crashes, or the Demendes shooting. So the VM board are faced with the usual risk versus wonga decision which is how they earn(!) their big bucks. Maybe someone like Branson (a minority shareholder) might try to intervene if it looks like the Virgin brand name will be tarnished by too blatant a shafting of their customers, but I doubt it.
So if we manage to 'win' the need for an explicit and informed opt-in by the end-user we will have done really well, and personally as long as I can keep my own browsing away from phorm and still have my 20Mb broadband from VM I will be happy.
I just don't believe the consent requirement from website owners will ever fly. We talk about 'publishing' stuff on the web because that is mostly what it is. Putting a no-phorm statement on a web page is like printing 'no estate agents are allowed to read this' inside the cover of Daltons Weekly. Technically it may be legally valid but in practice it is totally impractical. Of course the website host is entitled to refuse to serve his pages to whoever he likes, but once the HTML is served he cannot expect to dictate what happens to it. Of course tracking and profiling is a pretty scummy thing to do, but then the web is full of scummy people trying to scam a buck. Maybe somehow we can force a RIPA test case in court but I can't see this happening anytime soon and in any case it only applies in the UK.
I do really like the idea of 'dephormation' , both in terms of subverting phorm's inelegant and arrogant mangling of cookies; and the way it undermines the whole concept of targeted advertising. With a fair wind this could well take off and become a significant web presence. Somehow it seems a very 'Internet purist' solution if that makes sense.
Of course the real answer is the encrypted web, which should restore our privacy for a while anyway, at least until brute force decrypting in realtime becomes viable.
And lets not underestimate the opposition. in the words of Gerry Adams "they have not gone away".
