Quote:
Originally Posted by declanh
Can someone clarify something for me -
in the BBC interview with Alexander and Kent the interviewer (and Kent) states that everything you do when online is stored against your IP address (already - pre Phorm)
Can someone elaborate a little more on this - does he mean proxies or what ?
Does he mean search engines ? If its search engines that not everything ?
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No he means presumably that most web sites keep logs of their traffic which include IP address and also things like tracking cookies and search engines retaining your search terms.
The point he doesn't seem to get is whereas this is true this is extremely distributed. This data is held by millions of individual web sites and not linked together, nor is it under the control of a single entity, nor can it be seen usually by anyone but the web site owner.
So whereas we do have a digital footprint, it is broken into millions of pieces and scattered everywhere, Phorm on the other hand glues all those pieces back together to "Phorm" the full picture and give them a very clear facsimile of your entire browsing behaviour. This much data is a gift to marketing and advertising companies. The individual shards scattered across the web are -almost- useless on their own (I say almost because they do provide useful statistics for the web site owner), but Phorm conveniently ignore the point that they see everything, individual web sites only see what you do on their site and if referrer checking is used the site you came from. Tracking cookies don't fall under the same argument because they are bad and many are blocked by anti spyware/adware/virus or browser/OS based tools.
Alexander Hanff