Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]

[AlexanderHanff]

Phorm just announced a £32M equity boost after a share deal with Morgan Stanley and Canaccord Adams Ltd. So we need to work extra hard to drop the share price even more so that equity vanishes as quickly as they managed to make it appear.

Keep up the good work. Share price is down another 7.91% since opening this morning.

Fight the good fight!

Alexander Hanff

[OF1975]

ISP revenue from selling out your customers privacy rights to spyware-writing, rootkit installing, Phorm: Millions.

Numbers of customers going to change ISPs to escape this invasion of privacy: Thousands.

Revenue due to be lost by customers changing to a non-Phorm ISP: Millions.

Watching Phorms share price collapse: Priceless.

[AlexanderHanff]

Woah share price falling at > terminal velocity at the moment. 9 trades in the first hour of trading and only 1 buy. Currently down 245p (11.4%) since trading started.

Alexander Hanff

[Chris U]

[QUOTE=lucevans;34509543]In the absence of any information forthcoming from Phorm or Virgin Media, here are some more questions:

Tucked away in the small print of the scheme is the fact that a far more detailed record of the online activity of every customer will be stored in a "debugging" log for 14 days by Phorm, than will be stored in the "digest" (i.e. the aggregated, anonymized record they plan to hold on each of us for the purpose of targetting adverts at us).

What data fields will the debugging log contain? Will it include a user's IP address? Will it contain any of the information that was stripped-out of the digest to preserve the individuals anonymity or security? (By this I mean data like form fields, numbers, names, webmail data, etc.). Will it contain the raw data of encrypted pages that pass through the profiler?

It seems to me that by concentrating on the "anonymity" of the digest record of every customer, Phorm may be seeking to divert our attention from another, far more detailed, far less anonymous record that will be held "purely for administration and troubleshooting purposes"

Even if their intentions are honest regarding use of the debugging records (something I find hard to believe), surely these files would present a much more attractive target to hackers or criminal employees within Phorm or the ISPs, as they would contain lucrative personal information.

Who gets to see the debugging logs? (Russian spyware programmers, perhaps?) Are they exported outside the UK for "troubleshooting" by the "talented teams of programmers" that Phorm employ in the US and Russia? How do we know that they are irrecoverably destroyed after 14 days?

The questions just keep coming. Shame there are no answers.

======================

I'd be interested to see that small print, do you have a link ??

I have looked at the possibility of a link between RBN and Phorm, RBN is based in St. Perterburg, the Phorm Russian office is in Moscow, so far there is no obvious link other than 121 Media's past history.
(121 Media by the way is still an active and listed Subsiduary of Phorm)

Also worth noting is that soon after users found the oix.com server was apparently hosted on a Chinese IP, that changed quite quickly to being hosted by Fasthosts UK.

In the VM forums I issued a challenge to Phorm to allow a team of privacy and security experts to have access to several weeks worth of Phorm employees online data, including sites visited etc.

The Ernst Young audit did have some reservations about how the system could be open to abuse. Mr Davies of Privacy Internationals claimed by Phorm endorsement of the Phorm system in a BBC article he later posted that "They Had Not Endorsed Phorm" but on the face of Phorms description of how they claim it works had some good points.
But that was based on only the sales pitch being used by Phorm with no true technical analysis of the whole system or methods Phorm claim to use in public.

[AlexanderHanff]

Anyone know where I can find a free javascript/html stock chart for Phorm? Yahoo Finance do a nice "badge" but they don't support AIM yet so PHRM.L charts are not available.

I want to place a stock watch chart on the Deny Phorm blogspot page.

Been looking for one for a couple of days now, so far no success.

Alexander Hanff

[manxminx]

The questions just keep coming. Shame there are no answers.

Next Chat

Date: Thursday, March 20, 2008

Time: 1:30PM/13:30 GMT (London)

Where: www.webwise.com/chat

Subject: Phorm CEO Kent Ertugrul and SVP Technology Marc Burgess will answer questions LIVE about Webwise fraud protection, relevant advertising and user privacy.


Be there or be square!

[the_baby_jebus]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

Anyone know where I can find a free javascript/html stock chart for Phorm? Yahoo Finance do a nice "badge" but they don't support AIM yet so PHRM.L charts are not available.

I want to place a stock watch chart on the Deny Phorm blogspot page.

Been looking for one for a couple of days now, so far no success.

Alexander Hanff

add this to your page

<img src="http://uk.ichart.yahoo.com/b?s=PHRM.L" alt="http://uk.ichart.yahoo.com/b?s=PHRM.L"/> does todays
<img src="http://uk.ichart.yahoo.com/w?s=PHRM.L" alt="http://uk.ichart.yahoo.com/w?s=PHRM.L"/> does last 5 days
<img src="http://ichart.europe.yahoo.com/c/3m/p/phrm.l" alt="http://ichart.europe.yahoo.com/c/3m/p/phrm.l"/> does last 3 months

edit :
alternatively have a look here http://www.vss2000.com/financial/content.asp

[dav]

Originally Posted by manxminx

Next Chat

Date: Thursday, March 20, 2008

Time: 1:30PM/13:30 GMT (London)

Where: www.webwise.com/chat

Subject: Phorm CEO Kent Ertugrul and SVP Technology Marc Burgess will answer questions LIVE about Webwise fraud protection, relevant advertising and user privacy.


Be there or be square!

Yes...mmmm....only....they do just answer the easy questions, don't they?
I was on the last webchat with them and asked them some pretty difficult questions which were duly ignored. Granted, they were as carefully crafted as their responses to other questions, and loaded with booby-traps. Maybe they saw the trip-wires and decided to side-step them

[Florence]

Originally Posted by lostandconfused

Why would you cancel your services for a company thinking about doing something? I bet there are thousands of proposals that never get off the drawing board. Fair enough if they actually implement this, but if you've been reading this thread you'd have noticed that VM have gone very quiet on this and their logo has been removed from the phorm website which suggests that they are slowly backing away from it.

It sounds like you wanted to cancel anyway and are using this as an excuse as they havent made any changes, just suggestions.

Also they wont remove the cable, you can provided you dont damage the cable in the street but they wont send someone out to remove it for you.

I have also started the proces to move away from VM Their total lack of communication for so long leads me to remember the start of the capping on VM, yes our pressure had it removed in the end but it was still worked back in slowly. As this will be worked back in slowly they are only seeing the pounds sign this might generate and still show the normal contempt for customers.

Since speed isnt a problem for me then I am happy to move where phorm is not welcome.

I have access to Admin areas on forums where sometimes information that isnt to be shown to genral public is on view I just cannot trust VM wil not sneak in this phorm so to protect the forum owners and myself i quit VM as soon as the BT line is in and ADSL is activated.

[Bonglet]

Does anyone know when there talking about this going live hope it isnt already or im off too?

My view on this as regards VM is now they are not devious they are incompetent. I think they truly were fooled by phorm about this whole thing and had no idea of the storm that was about to break. Now like a scared person in a hurricane they are desperately trying to take cover till the storm passes. I cannot see another reason why with everything that is going on they have not come out oneway or another and are relying on platitudes to any customer that does enquire.

For me this has massively dented in my confidence in VM as a company and if they do implement this after everything that has come out i like many other thousands will cease all services with them. This is a bonanza for other company's by no fault of their own BT, TT and VM have handed them a priceless marketing ploy "We will not use phorm come to us".

[Zee]

i still dont understand, how do we opt-out? do we call them and say we wanna opt out?

[PhormUKPRteam]

Hi all

Apologies for recent absence - as per some news stories that have broken over the past few hours, we are pleased to be able to release the interim Privacy Impact Assessment that we've referred to in interviews and our live chats on Webwise. Simon Davies, Managing Director of 80/20 Thinking, conducted the Privacy Impact Assessment with his colleague Gus Hosein, who is Visiting Fellow, Information Systems Group at the London School of Economics.

The Privacy Impact Assessment is a review of Phorm systems and policies. Since this preliminary, initial report was written several weeks ago, we have addressed several claims in it. Among them, we have confirmed to 80/20 Thinking that Webwise does not track behaviours across sensitive sites; that anonymous cookies cannot be traced back to users; and that Webwise deliberately ignores "https" pages used by banks, and other personal data. We will work with 80/20 Thinking on an ongoing basis throughout the year to complete the assessment and ensure we confirm our leading privacy standards.

In the press, Mr Davies has openly commented: "In our view, Phorm has implemented privacy as a key design component in the development of its system. In particular, Phorm has quite consciously avoided the processing of personally identifiable information." In particular, Mr Davies told BBC News: "Phorm does advance the whole sector of protecting personal information by two to three steps."

To avoid the re-emergence of prior confusion: Privacy International, one of the leading privacy advocacy bodies, did not endorse us and do not endorse any companies. We engaged Mr Davies (founder and director of Privacy International, though not acting in that capacity to produce the report) because of his expertise and experience. He has spent decades railing against infringements of privacy. We expect that he and his team in a consulting capacity would apply the same intellectual rigour to their assessment of companies that they do in campaigning for privacy rights.

As a consultancy, 80/20 Thinking conducts audits for companies and it charges a fee to do so. Audits take time and resources, as the one conducted by Ernst & Young (View report PDF), and we haven't yet found a free audit service that is worth our trust or anyone else's.

We await a date for the final Assessment to be issued and will update this page when we know.

The full interim report is at http://www.phorm.com/user_privacy/pr...act_report.php and you can ask questions on the site too

[Julian Smart]

Hi PhormUKPRTeam,

If the system avoids 'sensitive' sites, doesn't that imply processing them to tell whether they are sensitive? Then we only have Phorm's word for it that nothing will be done with that information.

I think a lot of the concerns come down to: "you have access to the information, and only your word that you won't do anything bad with it." How would you counter that perception? Obviously a report or two can't allay the suspicion that the system could be tweaked without anyone knowing, a fear even expressed clearly in at least one of the commissioned reports.

[AlexanderHanff]

PhormUKPRTeam I will paste what I said on BadPhorm in relation to the -identical- message you posted on their forums:

PhormUKPRTeam you are lying, it is that simple. The advertisers themselves will be in a position to match IP addresses to "anonymous" cookies.

It would then be a very simple task to write a script to link every single anonymous cookie to an IP.

Epic Phail

Alexander Hanff

To everyone else who doesn't understand what I mean. According to their patent application advertisers will send the unique "anonymous" ID of the Phorm profiling cookie to the OIX server in order to grab the "relevant" ads. This means that compiling a list of IP address based on the cookie ID is a trivial matter.

This is all based on their patent application which is all we really have to go on with regards how their "proprietary" systems work.

Alexander Hanff