[phormwatch]

Also, Kent and Phorm make the summer issue of Focus magazine (bought at airport). That's BBC Focus magazine issue #192:

For and Against:

Is using data mining to target ads a step too far?

No
Kent Ertugrul
Ceo, Phorm (data mining firm that aims to 'deliver the right ads to the right people')

THere are several problems with the web today. It doesn't adequately address people's privacy concerns and there's no obvious way to pay for a better, faster browsing experience. In addition, only a handful of internet publishers make any money online and it's hard for offline publishers to move online successfully.

Phorm's technology helps address those needs. It improves customer protection against fraudulent internet sites and reduces the number of irrelevant ads people see -- all without storing any personal information, making it simply impossible to reverse engineer the anonymisation process. Users benefit because the adds will be far more relevant to them. Also, because of its greater accuracyt, more money overall will be spent on internet advertising, and even small websites can now get a much larget slice of the £2.8 billion spent on internet advertising last year. That will allow greater investment in the content and services that people enjoy today - mostly for free. Our technology is a groundbreaking step forward in online privacy, and has the potential to radically improve the internet.



Yes
Becky Hogge
Executive Director, Open Rights Group

We are used to websites setting cookies so they can track our behaviour, but what the company Phorm proposes is to track your online activity not just at the browsing level, but at hte network level, by tracking the activities associated with your internet connection. If you think about how much of life people now conduct on the internet - everything from banking to private email, to online support groups for health conditions - a lot of that material is deeply private.
Phorm has been careful to explain some of the steps it is taking to exclude private material like email, but these aren't going to exclude everything. In the end, why would consumers consent to risk their privacy in this manner? What are they getting in return? It's like letting the Royal Mail open all your letters just so it can send you a better class of junk mail.
Until there is a qualified regulator, we simply have to trust that the software does what it says it does.

---------- Post added at 22:07 ---------- Previous post was at 22:04 ----------

You can send in letters to:

focus -at- bbcmagazinesbristol -dot- com

Yes, that's magazineS