Phorm Causing a Storm

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March 27th, 2008 by Mike

During the last couple of weeks there has been a rumbling in the clouds over a new technology that's challenging the boundaries of what's acceptable in search online.

BT. Virgin and TalkTalk have all signed up to trial a new technology known as 'Phorm', that tracks user's habits and patterns online in order to target them with advertising. Here's what I found out about how Phorm works:

'Phorm assigns a user’s browser a unique identifying number, which, it is claimed, nobody can associate with your IP address, not even your ISP. It then uses information about your surfing habits, gathered by searching the URLs you request and the websites you visit for key words, to assign that unique number to various “channels” (for example “golf”, “travel” or “handbags”). When you visit a website which has a “Phorm please put an ad in here” tag, Phorm serves an ad from a channel where your unique number appears'

All this talk reminds me of a similar issue a few months back with relation to Facebook and a program called ‘Beacon’. If and when different Facebook users went shopping online, Beacon told friends and businesses what they looked at or bought. Many considered the data sharing to be an intrusion too far.

This latest technology is sure to raise the same issues as previously experienced with Facebook. In that case an online petition lead the withdrawal of the ‘Beacon’ Program from the social networking site.
Is this new technology a threat to our privacy online? Ill let you decide

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