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...but will it have any effect on powers that are in charge? As for influence on us, most users who know who he is already share this position.

"It's mine -- you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me."

"This content is mine; you can't have it. If you want to access it for free, you have to let me track your activity."

I agree with ol' Tim. An ISP's job is to provide a pipe for the Internet, charge for usage, and stay out of the way. That's all.

Unless I want them to do something else. And tracking me is not something I want. That's right, spam filtering is something else that I want to be "opt-in", and content filtering, and every other bloody sort of filtering.

Actually though, I would be happy if they paid me, but for one week at a time. For that one week I'll happily browse Goatse, Goatshe, Tubgirl etc. (images downloaded, but not displayed, I'm not that crazy). Any real browsing I'll do via my own encrypted proxy set-up at my webhost.

Basically, I'm not the target audience for tracking.

Anyway, it's great to see this sort of issue on mainstream media. Now just to get the 'normal' people to read it...

Quite honestly, if they want to track my internet usage, and exert some control over my online experience, then they can.

In return, I want high speed internet access to be provided free of change, with no download limit.

Sound fair?

Kent Ertugrul, chief executive, of Phorm, told BBC News: "We have not had the chance to describe to Tim Berners-Lee how the system works and we look forward to doing that.

You think you need to explain how your tracker works to the father of the internet , and that once you do, he'll be ok with it. Boy, if that ain't arrogance right there, I don't know what is.

After having read the article, I would have to agree with Tim. Where I go on the 'tubes is none of my ISPs business. And this is not about trying to hide some illicit activity, but a defense of my right to live without being watched everywhere I go. I must say, though, that I am not surprised to see this coming out of England. When are its citizens going to finally stand up for their rights and put and end to all of the cameras and tracking? V's speech begins to come to mind.

Hi all As the name suggests I work for the Phorm Comms Team. In response to Tim's comments and the raft of commentary tht has followed, we also believe that it is wrong to store Internet users' personal data. Our technology is a real turning point in the protection of privacy online - it does not store personally identifiable information, does not store IP addresss and nor does it store browsing histories. By contrast, ad targeting from other major Internet companies means that potentially identifiable personal data is stored for over 12 months before it is even anonymised. Also, because these companies reach nearly all UK Internet users, consumers effectively have no real choice about being targeted in this way. With the Phorm technology, users can choose - they can opt out or in at any time; and again, no personal data is stored . We look forward to speaking to Tim Berners Lee to explain how our technology is a ground breaking advance in delivering targeted ads while protecting privacy online and consumer choice, as we have with other experts.

Here are the notes I took from a sales pitch to a client. Although NDAs were passed around, all of the technical and business consulting staff refused to sign them, so this information is freely available and can in no way be considered a trade secret. Some of my notes come from other people's observations in the ensuing PR war. Phorm's sales teams have been aggressively targeting large ISPs with low margins around Europe and the US in the last year or so. They only pitch to board level decision makers, and like to avoid providing any technical detail whenever possible.

Phorm has hired a specialty PR company, Citigate Dewe Rogerson [citigatedr.co.uk] to alter public perception of any complaints found in blogs, news programs, and on technical sites. They have been aggressively pasting boilerplate responses about the legality of the system, using carefully sanitized language to obfuscate the debate. The company specialises in mastering public opinion as part of crisis management during corporate fiascos. They may be employing a few companies like this, I've seen Dutch, German and French language follow-up posts in the last few weeks.

Phorm has addressed the main part of pesky privacy laws in Europe by "gifting" the collection equipment to the ISP using a standard 5 year depreciation schedule. The interception and initial filtering kit officially becomes property of the ISP, but is installed, maintained, configured and run by Phorm's technical team. If the equipment stays 5 years in the ISP's premises, then it becomes the full property of the ISP. The ISP can claim to privacy oversight groups that the equipment belongs to them, and that all the personal information hasn't left their network should post-analysis show the customer has "opted-out" of passing the information to Phorm's China-based servers. The data is still captured and analyzed, just not all of it is passed to Phorm.

The Phorm collectors sit inside the ISP's network, and collect all internet traffic from all clients all the time. Web traffic is directed to machines that analyze the request, and respond with some HTML code redirecting the browser to one of the many domains operated by Phorm. The code can be customised depending on browser string to put an invisible iframe or other HTML structure surrounding the subsequent web pages. The redirect is to trick the browser into sending cookies associated with one of the many Phorm domains, and to accept new cookies. Once the cookies are read and re-written, more HTML code is sent to once again redirect the browser to try the original request, which then passes through the ISP's network to the internet. This is how Phorm claims to read the opt-out cookies should they exist. No cookies returned is considered opt-in at this point.

The problem I, and others, had with Phorm's plan was that they leave some kind of HTML trick code running in the browser session to track all subsequent web traffic and to allow them to intercept anything they believe to be relevant.

As an example, let's take an ordinary, un-intercepted session to slashdot.org. The browser sends an HTML request to the slashdot servers, which respond with code asking about cookies which can be used to display a customised page for logged-in slashdot users. The browser can't be tricked by slashdot's servers to return cookies from digg or google.

With Phorm, the initial HTML request to slashdot.org gets intercepted by the Phorm equipment, which respond with a 302 redirect to spyware.ru, the browser then does a lookup and redirect to the new site. Note, that at this point, no traffic has managed to escape the ISP and get to the internet. At this point, the Phorm interceptor machine can also respond to the DNS lookup for malware.ru with the correct address for slashdot.org, to prevent any kind of local firewalling based on known bad networks. The browser tries to get to malware.ru with the new address, and once again the Phorm equipment returns some HTML code. This is where the serious trouble begi