[PhormUKPRteam]

Originally Posted by Traduk

PhormUktechteam,

It doesn't matter one iota who owns the profiler or who writes the software because one fact is virtually certain and that is if Phorm did not exist, neither would the profiler.

I am sorry but your answer does nothing to alleviate any fears and if anything you appear to be shifting the responsibility back to the ISP's which I doubt will please them.

There is a question that you can answer (maybe). Can you assure me\us that an opt-out ensures that no data of any kind passes through or is mirrored to the profiler?.

I do not have that information in black and white in front of me so I have passed this over to Phorm.

---------- Post added at 09:21 ---------- Previous post was at 09:17 ----------

Originally Posted by popper

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012101340.html
"IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says

By Aoife White
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 22, 2008; Page D01

BRUSSELS -- IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany's data-protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the E.U. group, which is preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others comply with E.U. privacy law.

Scharr told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address, "then it has to be regarded as personal data."

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is.

That is true but does not take into consideration that many people regularly use the same computer and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

These exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of "whois" Internet sites, which allow users to type in an IP address and will then generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.
...
"

To clarify,

Phorm can never know who you are or where you've browsed. All that is ever stored is a random number, advertiser categories eg sport or travel and a timestamp. Phorm technology cannot tie into the ISPs authentication systems or any other information the ISP holds on their subscriber.

---------- Post added at 09:24 ---------- Previous post was at 09:21 ----------

Originally Posted by Phormic Acid

I also think Phorm’s claim that no information gets written to disc is probably rather misleading. When people look at their computer at home and think “where am I going to store 500GB of data?”, the answer will be “on a hard disc.” If you’re a business, this isn’t necessarily so. You could get something like the Gear6 CACHEfx.

Gear6 satiates hungry apps with 500GB RAM monster

I’m not suggesting Phorm will be using that. They’ve probably built their own storage system using standard parts.

Phorm have only got to store textual pages. So, not memory-hogging images and videos. Let’s assume the average HTML page is 100KB in size. You could get around 5 million pages into 500GB, allowing for storage overheads.

Many big pages contain a lot of junk. They’re generated on request, using things like PHP. They’ll contain the same code snippets over and over again, lots of white space or even large numbers of HTML comments. That could all be stripped out prior to caching. It could be as simple as stopping passing on the stream when a ‘<’ is reached and starting again on the next ‘>’. You might want to collect the alternative text for images. That would add a bit of complexity, but there’s no reason why it can’t be done in real-time within the stream, saying using some FPGAs.

If you strip out all the crud, you might get down to an average of 25KB per page. Then, you’d get around 20 million pages into 500GB of RAM.

I will forward this to the tech team and get a full reply on this.