Quote:
Originally Posted by Valerie
gosh - it's hard work keeping up with this! Can someone explain how phorm differs from google ads?
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Simple: Unless you have signed into a google service on your browser (such as gmail), then google ads are based on the content of the page you are browsing. This is why people sometimes get ads for things they would never normally be interested in. However, no yt
Apparently, if you sign in to any google service (although google don't actually make this clear), then Google ads do track you. I must stress, I don't know for sure if this does happen. As Google's system is entirely based on the ad code on the page, and cookies (as such, it runs on the browser), it is also easy to block (block javascript on the site, or cookies and Googleads is crippled).
The phorm system works differently. For a start, while the system can be configured so that people need to opt in to recieve the ads, or opt out not to recieve them, it is likely that each isp will opt in all it's users by default.
Secondly, Phorm install hardware on the ISP's network that is used to do the tracking, and insert the ads if appropriate.
Now, while they state that they do not store a personally identifiable browsing history (note: regardless of what they say, they do store a history that can be tracked to the user, if they didn't, then the system wouldn't work), we have no way of checking that they aren't storing the data even if they don't serve ads. It is also difficult to stop them. Well, not that difficult if you want to trust system such as TOR, but bearing in mind that due to the anonymous nature of TOR, there are some dodgy people on it, I am not sure it's trustworthy.