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Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]
Quote:
Originally Posted by lucevans
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07...ds_https_only/
So, google are to start encrypting their webmail pages from start to finish, eh? Presumably they want to ensure that they are the only ones who are going to be able to profit from profiling the contents of their customers' e-mails.
Didn't someone here predict that the effect Phorm would have would be to drive more and more sites to switch to https? Looks like Google are setting the trend...
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I don't know about this forum but I posted the following on the BT Forum on 12th May.
It is entirely because the internet is so new and growing so quickly that we need our government to draw the lines now before it's too late. The internet is not going to come to a halt because one money-making scheme fails but it is at serious risk if people are afraid to use it.
The alternative - one which I predict will be with us very soon if this goes ahead - will be the encoding all data between users and between users and websites using private keys such that Phorm style systems can not read the data. If Phorm want to read your data or access data transferred from your website, they would have to be granted a key and pay for it if so required. As the data - including the website's content would only be decrypted after it reaches the end-user's computer, it would not be available in any usable format for the ISP and the whole Webwise idea falls to pieces.
Even the use of a simple encryption key on the data would require an illegal act on the part of BT or Phorm (or any other similar system) as unauthorised decryption is prohibited under existing law without a warrant and it is extremely unlikely that any such warrant would ever be issued on the basis of "we want to make a profit". Even the police and security services sometimes get refused such warrants and such intervention has always been taken very seriously in the UK.
If you combine encryption with data compression you have a doubly useful tool given as the volume of data carried could be reduced making better use of bandwidth. Imagine that everything you send or receive travels along the internet as an password protected zip file with a non-commercial use condition applied not to the data itself but to the key. It kills Phorm's argument that information on the web is freely available and makes it immediataley and irrefutably illegal to access the data. Newer PCs with multicore processors will not even see a marked slowdown as the data is transferred - it could still be packeted - and decrypted on the fly at the PC. Older PC's may be slower at the encryption/decryption but this is a short term problem which reduces as PCs are replaced.
Governments have always tried to oppose such an idea as it could be used to prevent monitoring by official bodies such as anti-terrorism or anti-childporn investigators. The US government has often tried to and sometimes succeeded in preventing new encryption techniques from being made available to the public for similar reasons. The public in America are more worried about government monitoring than about commercial datra usage but even they seem to be getting hot under the collar about this issue now that they've been informed that various ISPs have been intercepting their data over the last year or so.
It may be that faced with such a system coming into being purely to avoid ISP level profiling for profit, governments may decide that allowing such action by data carriers is not quite as trivial as they seem to believe it is at present.
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