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Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff
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
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OK - i get that, i see everyones IP address that visits my website via statcounter - but statcounter only sees who visits which sites they track - it does not build a profile for invidivual peoples entire internet usage, nor does google (apart from search queries). So his analogy seems irredeemably flawed IMHO if his comparison is that what phorm plan to do is somehow similar to website owners profiling their visitors (this is back to the tesco clubcard analogy where tesco only see what you buy from them).