Quote:
Originally Posted by Aegis
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It depends on how they acquire their data; if they intercept
all the http traffic of the ISP customer, then they are the same as Phorm. If they don't, they are not.
Without any firm technical description of they system, it's impossible to say with any certainty, but from what little I have read about them, they appear to work the same way as other site-based cookie ad tracking systems, but with more "cross-site" sharing of user click-data - i.e. they make the data about your visit to site A who is a publishing client of theirs available to site B, who is also a client of theirs. If you visit site C, who is NOT a client of theirs, then neither site A or site B gets to know anything about what you looked at on site C.
This is very different to the way Phorm works: i.e. sites A and B in the above example would be able to know what you looked at not only on site C, but also sites D-Z (whether they were partners of Phorm or not), and also a lot of what you did in terms of webmail, iTunes, Microsoft Office and pretty much anything else that utilizes the HTTP protocol on port 80.