Quote:
Originally Posted by mark777
Just a quick one for the tech bods because I can't get my head around it.
Two weeks prior to the trial, advertising space was bought on non-phorm advertising platforms to do the cookie drop (as it would otherwise have breached BT T&C's).
Does this mean that the cookies would have been dropped into the 3rd party ad host domain?
Does this also mean the ad hosts must have been complicit? (Although I can't think why, they are rivals).
Presumably, then once the trial started, BT/Phorm would need to wait for the user to visit that ad domain again in order to retrieve the cookie and read the UID. Then it could forge cookies into all domains?
Why would this still not breach BT's T&C's?
Or have I got it all wrong?
|
Disclaimer: The following is NOT fact.. it is just a possible scenario for what happened and is only guesswork based on the information available.
My guess is that when they purchased ad space, the banners were served from a phorm (or then 121media) server, eg rather than supplying the ad company with the image files for banners they just gave them a link to point to (eg
http://www.phormadserver.com/banner.php). So when you visited
www.apopularshoppingsite.com (i hope that isn't a real site
), a banner was served from the phorm server which also dropped a cookie on the users machine.
This would seem logical, but I imagine when they ran the actual ad part of the trial, they purchased ad space again supplying the same link instead of an image (eg
http://www.phormadserver.com/banner.php) meaning that all cookies dropped previously would be readable when ads were served. This would allow them to decide if you should be served a default advert or a targeted one.
The question arises however... how were they updating that cookie information to assign you to the advertising channels? My brain cogs are whirring... I think another read of Dr Claytons report is in order.