A warm welcome to the 45 guests who are here this afternoon. Welcome to this thread, focussed
firmly on the topic of Phorm, Webwise, and Advertising. We hope you find the discussion informative although it can get quite confusing at times.
The news over the last day or two has mostly been around website copyright with some significant legal cases in the headlines that may have a bearing on the Webwise/Phorm model for intercepting traffic between website visitors and website, involving as it does, copying and then exploiting for commercial gain, the intellectual content of web pages.
There have also been developments relating to copyright questions around the licensing of Open Source software that may also have a bearing on Webwise.
Encouragingly the debate about Phorm has started to widen, with the issues being raised in the US Congress, and the EU and beginning to get coverage in mainstream media. Our government is
overdue with it's answers to a
series of questions from the EU Commission, about the covert and probably illegal trials of Webwise in 2006 and 2007 by BT. It also seems that Webwise was
covertly trialled in the US in 2005. All these trials apparently took place without the consent of the ISP customers who whose data traffic was being intercepted and profiled.
Visitors new to the topic can find a few useful links in my
post 11849
We hope you will return and even better, participate in the debate, and begin to campaign against this intrusive new technology.
If you run a business or run an e-commerce site have a look at this
Open Letter.
If you simply use the internet as a (hopefully) private citizen, read
this flyer. Feel free to distribute these around your friends and contacts if you agree with their contents.