A Setback for ISP Web Tracking

angelheaded tips a Wired story about the resignation of Bob Dykes, CEO of net eavesdropping firm NebuAd. NebuAd has encountered financial troubles lately as the privacy controversy surrounding the company's tracking methods has driven communications companies away. Over in the UK, Phorm responded to the NebuAd news by affirming that it is making progress with its advertising methods. From The Register: "In response to the outcry over our revealing its two secret trials, BT said in April it would re-engineer the planned deployment so traffic to and from customers who do not want their web use profiled for marketing purposes would not come into contact with the Phorm system. The original blueprint meant that a opt-out cookie would tell the technology to simply ignore refuseniks' browsing as it passed through. It's thought the change has proved tricky. Phorm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the alleged technical problems, but [BT's chief press officer Adam Liversage] said: 'We have been working on some things with Phorm.'"

Why not?

[Creepy Crawler]

Why not just go to the big pipe guys and ask if they could sniff connections inbound and outbound on arbitrary nodes?

Doing a sniffed bridged router is a piece of cake and it allows sniffing of all unencrypted content.

Re:Why...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately they don't. A lot of the smaller guys - particularly podcasters and webcomic artists - have discovered that it's just about possible to run a business solely on the goodwill, and desire for merchandise of listeners.

Sadly a lot of the big guys are taking a very long time to realise this.

Re:They have been discussing

[Antique Geekmeister]

No one is going to prison. The British are even more used to overt, and covert, silence in every aspect of their lives than the USA. Look at the NSA tapping of the core routers of UUnet, and the lack of any prosecutions for blatantly illegal government activity.

As long as they cooperate with law enforcement monitoring desires, I'm afraid there's not going to be any prosecution of any sort.

Re:Why...

[Darkness404]

If they are really good at what they do, they will have a loyal fanbase that will support them via merchandise or donations. Just look at Homestar Runner, TBC makes a profit solely by merchandise sales.

Not to mention that a lot of sites that have ads (I'm looking at you cable news stations) already have a steady revenue of money from somewhere.