Quote:
Originally Posted by Toto
Actually, I think then that your post may also raise the question of whether Google's search engine gathering bots are also illegal, nevermind Phorm.
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In most cases though it's of benefit to have your site indexed by search engines as that's one way to attract more visitors and potentially more sales. If not, the site owner can add a few meta tags or create a robots.txt page to prevent the site being crawled.
In the case of Phorm, it's the opposite. They analyse the contents of the page then display an advert for a competitor a few seconds later. The website has just lost a sale & Phorm has made a profit. There was nothing that site could do to prevent that.
Phorm could argue that they won't analyse any pages if asked by the owners, but the terms & conditions are already in saying you can't do it.
I'm not sure if everyone would want, or be able to sign up with Phorm.
according to this page "I see they start their publisher info request form with traffic details - smallest on the list is 500k - 1 million - so it would seem they are targeting higher traffic sites or possibly networks." If they're using their own advertising, are a subscription site, or in the case of the BBC, not allowed to run ads then they might not!