[r1ch]

TOR itself might not be a great solution to get around Phorm, but it did get me thinking about some other possibilities... Phorm's ability to match advertising to content is already pretty limited but we could further reduce its effectiveness by create a plugin that:

Screws up profiling with dummy requests
- The more dummy requests are sent out, the more the profiling is polluted and the less use it becomes
Creates huge numbers of Phorm user ids for each user
- Given that Phorm can't store the user IP address they can't know how many user ids a user has. This could seriously damage the efficiency (and scalability) of their system and, of course, it reduces the effectiveness of the profiling. In the extreme, we could even create a new Phorm id for each request.
Shares user ids between users
- The wider a user id is shared the more worthless it becomes
Blocks any OIX adverts
- The less hits the ads receive the less their clients will be willing to pay.
At the end of the day, the point of Phorm is to make money. If we can do anything to make it more expensive for them to do business and reduce their income then we can increase our chances of getting rid of them.

I'm locked into a BT contract for a while longer (unless I can argue my way out due to the T&C changes) so I might give it a go.