August 27, 2008

B2B marketing efforts? I bet they are.

How do you convince a business who's web pages and private data communications are exploited to profile its customers, and the resulting customer profiles used to promote competitors.

In any objective analysis you'd call it industrial espionage, and you'd (rightly) expect it was illegal.

And it probably is. It is likely Phorm would breach the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the Copyright Act, and a range of other laws including Computer Misuse and Fraud.

I imagine BT will keep 'postponing' their trials for rather a long time.

No factual evidence whatsoever of anything particularly worrying going on.

Just hippy tin-foil hat wearing hysterics bleating on about personal freedoms etc. while world goes to hell in hand cart with important stuff like war, famine, disease, crime etc. etc..

They certainly do have "huge interest in our technology and its possibilities", though it's probably not the kind they'd like it to be. It's not clear what they'll use TBG for, trying to get more ISPs onboard or brokering further advertising deals, probably the latter.

I'm no hippy (shaved head!) and certainly not a hysteric. It seems to me that most people would NOT want targeted adverts on the internet content they view, it's quite a creepy idea that a system watches what you do and individually builds up a profile of you using techniques which are at least dubious and probably illegal. That's why BT are currently being investigated by the UK police and the report made to the police has not been ignored full stop. That's also probably why the European Commission is watching what the UK Government does about it now.

And yes, my websites are copyright. I give permission for anyone to view them, but just because I publish them for that reason, does NOT mean I give permission for a particular business (Phorm - aka 121 Media the spyware company and its CEO Kent Ertugrul) to make money off the back of my work by scanning it and making a database of people who look at it.

You only have to take a look at Norton or F-Secure anti-viral PC systems websites to find references to the work of Kent Ertugrul's team and their "Rootkits" designed to stop people removing software written to "spy" on them in the passed.

Phorm is just Spyware at the ISP level. He thought he'd found a guaranteed way to stop people removing it with anti-virus systems. Fortunately he was wrong.

@ Roobarb... So much leaf, so little substance. I like it, it grows well up here in the North. I like it but it doesn't always agree with me!

Custard.

I asked TBG about their relationship with Phorm.

They replied:

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm afraid that we simply cannot discuss our business with Phorm with you (or anyone else)"

Why the secrecy?