BT Silences Customers Over Phorm 196
An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that BT, the UK's dominant telecom and internet service provider, has 'banned all future discussion of Phorm and its "WebWise" targeted advertising product on its customer forums, and deleted all past threads about the controversy dating back to February.' Phorm is a controversial opt-out system for delivering targeted advertising that intercepts traffic passing through an ISP in order to profile subscribers via an assigned unique ID based on their online activities. Subscribers can opt-out at the Webwise website but are opted-in again if the Phorm cookie is cleared. Firefox users can install Melvin Sage's Firephorm add-on to manage their interaction with Phorm and Webwise."
Heuristic: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Heuristic: (Score:5, Insightful)
[Adam Liversage, BT's chief press officer] said the fact that BT had chosen not only to close the threads but delete them entirely was insignificant. "It doesn't matter either way because the people who are following this will have the threads backed up in multiple copies," he said.
Wow, that's something only a PR man could say with a straight face.
Seems they don't want to admit the difference between stopping speech and suppressing it.
Re:Heuristic: (Score:4, Insightful)
Well...
As someone who's been banned from a couple forums, I can attest that "forums are private and there's no requirement for free speech". In other words the owner of the forum can be a dictatorial censor is that's what he wishes; it's his forum. Same applies to British Telecom.
The only catch: If BT is a government-owned company, then the government may be in violation of its own laws. Too bad the U.K. doesn't have some "supreme law of the land" to act as a contract which the government must follow, and provides guarantees such as free speech which cannot be over-ruled by a politician.
Re:Heuristic: (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm not talking about just the last eight years.
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As far as I can tell the U.S., States, and other courts enforce the Supreme Law quite well. Not perfectly, but better than if we had no Supreme Law to protect our free speech.
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The British Parliament has nothing to limit the damage it can cause to its own citizens. All it takes is a simple 50%+1 vote to take away British citizens freedoms. Like speech.
Not really accurate. You need a majority in *both* houses of parliament to get a bill passed, and the House of Lords does not have a majority for the governing party. The house of lords *can* be overridden (via the parliament act) but this takes considerable time and will not always succeed (because if the house of lords is being ove
Re:Heuristic: (Score:5, Insightful)
If BT is a government-owned company
It isn't.
then the government may be in violation of its own laws.
They're not.
Too bad the U.K. doesn't have some "supreme law of the land" to act as a contract which the government must follow
It does.
and provides guarantees such as free speech which cannot be over-ruled by a politician.
It does. It could be over-ruled by a whole lot of politicians working together, of course. Can you say "constitutional amendment"? Or maybe "Patriot Act" is easier (at least, it was for the politicians).
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As an ISP, BT does not "own" the data it transmits over its wires, any more than UPS owns the packages they're transporting between people.
The rest of your argument is then ridiculous.
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BT don't have to give you the soapbox, it's up to YOU to supply that.
We have obviously confused "rights" with "courtesies".
BT is under no obligation to provide the soapbox.
The fact that they have provided the soapbox for at least 100 years, suddenly to deny it to people who want to talk about this one specific issue is, while well within their rights, an astonishing show of bad faith.
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Re:Heuristic: (Score:5, Insightful)
Another question is if they by injecting information into the HTML stream is violating the copyright of the original content.
Otherwise this is also a good motivation for sites and users to use HTTPS more.
Re:Heuristic: (Score:5, Insightful)
It surely violates the webowners' rights, who PAID to have their ads appear on your screen, but instead British Telecom is blocking them: "BT Webwise also personalizes the online advertising you see when browsing on participating websites by linking ads to your interests. For example, if you search for a weekend trip to Paris or visit pages related to Paris, BT Webwise would replace the standard ads....."
I know if I was Google, Apple, Microsoft, or some other website, I would not be happy.
Ads are what pay my bills. How dare BT remove my revenue-source and jeopardize my ability to continue providing a Free website to my customers?
Is this really how it works? (Score:5, Informative)
It is my understanding that BT won't be removing your ads. Instead, "WebWise" will be a competing advertising provider to the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc. You can elect to put Phorm ads on your site instead, and in theory, those ads will be behaviorally targeted at the people browsing your site. (Or at least, the people who haven't opted out.) If you don't use Phorm, whatever provider's ads you sign up for will be shown.
The shitstorm, as I understand it, isn't that website owners' ads won't be displayed. It's that people using this WebWise thing while browsing your site will be reporting what they're doing to a third party, and since it's opt-in, many (most?) probably won't even know that they're doing it.
Worse, because WebWise now knows that Joe Schmo is interested in whatever it is your web site is advertising, say, cars, then it will start displaying car ads from your competitors on sites that have contracts with Phorm because Joe browsed your site.
All in all, pretty scummy, but I'd genuinely be surprised if it actually removes ads from sites that have nothing to do with it. Especially since they're talking about making it opt-in, I can't imagine that wouldn't be unquestionably illegal.
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Okay. Let's suppose I'm Google, and I have expenses to pay, so I put ads on my site. However people from British Telecom are seeing ads from Phorm instead. How does the money flowing into Phorm pay my google.com bills? The answer of course is that it does not.
So we're back to what I said before: "BT is removing my revenue-source and jeopardizing my ability to continue providing a Free website."
Still not correct? (Score:4, Informative)
Again, this is not my understanding of how it works.
As I read it, if you put Google ads on your site, people from British Telecom are seeing Google ads, period. However, as a web site owner, you can instead choose to put Phorm ads on your site, in which case, people from British Telecom will see the behavior tailored ads.
There's nothing new in that. What is new, and what I understand has everyone so up in arms, is that when British Telecom people are visiting your site (and seeing Google ads), Phorm is finding out about it and logging that fact, so that when British Telecom people visit other sites that have Phorm ads, what they will see is based on what they saw when they visited your site (with Google ads).
Plus, as an opt-out system, people won't know that the sites they're visiting are being silently watched by a third party, which is always very uncool.
If they're actually replacing content served by non-affiliated third parties (i.e. Google, or site owners who run Google ads), I'd like to see a reference to that, because I'm wrong in how I believe this works.
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I know I'm not part of the whole big Slashdot "privacy" thing, but I really have a hard time seeing anything wrong with that. Maybe it should be opt-in, but what's the big freakin' deal? I'd much prefer to see targeted ads than non-targeted ones.
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It's a deal between the web-owner, Phorm and the ISP. Phorm buys advertising slots for banner adverts from the web-owners as per usual. But instead of just displaying random adverts like a traditional advertiser, they have a pipe attached to the ISP's network, that routes traffic to their facility which performs a deep-packet analysis of all Internet traffic generated by their users. These would be Internet search requests, web-page names, headers and other juicy bits of text. These are associated with each
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"Another question"
to get back on topic, i'm rather disturbed that British ISPs would partner themselves with a company with a history of distributing spyware/malware [wikipedia.org] and uses deceptive (and arguably illegal) tactics, such as using a rootkit, to get/keep their software installed on the computers of unsuspecting individuals.
i'm not from the U.K. so i don't know how much choice Brits have with regards to broadband access. if it's anything like the U.S. then BT subscribers probably won't be able to just switch
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Thankfully we have a lot of choice and a very competitive market. It is trivial to switch to a different provider, and while most of your data may still be going over BT's networks, BT won't have a legal leg to stand on if they try to intercept communications belonging to people who aren'
As a BT customer (Score:5, Funny)
I'm concerned about how they're hiding the history of ***** use. Deleting post on ***** is quite extreme, and who knows what they'll do next? Start censoring the use of ***** on their network?
Re:As a BT customer (Score:5, Funny)
Not a tech support issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our broadband support forums are designed to be a place where customers can discuss technical support issues and offer solutions.
And someone hijacking and modifying your data isn't a technical support issue?
Re:Not a tech support issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems to be the tactic of the day. Apple does the same thing in their forums, delete any posts mentioning things they don't want mentioned on the grounds that it is a user to user technical support forum.
Yet you can post gushing praise of Apple without asking for help or offering to help and the moderators leave those fanboy posts alone.
This is a good reason to start an independent forum on any one of a number of forum hosting sites, preferably out of the reach of BT.
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If you are a BT subscriber, it appears nothing is out of their reach at this point.
Re:Not a tech support issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most people aren't that smart.
They don't see negative reviews, so they never think anything is amiss. ("Out of sight; out of mind.") Removing negative reviews is an effective strategy for BT to use.
Re: "Praising with Faint Damnation"? (Score:3, Insightful)
There used to be a phrase "Damn with faint praise". Said in an Alan Rickman snarl one would completely wither the opposition with some remark. Such as: after a resounding technical explanatory victory, the opponent murmurs, "nice vocabulary."
You're right that if stuff looks totally "Pleasantville" then it comes through kinda snitty. But if you allow some *token* complaints, you can give the illusion of fairness while still hiding the killer points.
"Announcement: Posted by Admin: We're sorry if you experien
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Exactly my problem with blogs that censor negative comments.
Re:Not a tech support issue? (Score:4, Informative)
I encountered this with Apple. I was on their forum a few times, making rational complaints that they didn't support a certain professional camera's RAW files (Epson R-D1). Within hours, the post would be deleted. The first time I thought it was a glitch. After that I knew they were fucking with me.
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Some people just Don't Get it. Apple DOES have RAW support for the Epson D1 [apple.com]. Your problem was you were in a hurry. Apple, in it's Mysterious Ways, was way ahead of you. They knew suppo
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Because my own site doesn't get much traffic from users (and potential users) of the manufacturer's product.
If a third-party forum exists, then bully. But not all manufacturers and service providers are unlucky enough to have a community-run forum to watchdog 'em.
Re:Not a tech support issue? (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, here in Australia we have Whirlpool [whirlpool.net.au] for exactly that. The forums are very active, and all of the major ISPs have employees who get involved to at least refute rumours and clarify information about their services. It's being able to get unfiltered comments from customers which is the most valuable, though. It's a very useful resource.
Re:Not a tech support issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just hijacking and modifying data, but an active classic man in the middle attack.
Imagine this ad server being compromised, and instead of "just" adding random ads to pages and logging customer activities for sale, picture it redirecting to phishing sites or just grabbing passwords sent to sites that are not SSL protected.
Same here ... (Score:2, Interesting)
My ISP recently turned on a similar system. I'm quite unhappy about it but I really don't have a realistic alternate ISP (boonies, telco, blah blah blah). It really does suck when things like this happen. I don't do anything illegal, but I still like my (relative) privacy and the ISP is the easiest place to attach my real identity to my data paths.
So, for now, I'm pondering going back to a fulltime SSH VPN to my web host for everything except the few apps I use that need low latency.
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...so that we can taunt them?
A second time?
Wasn't Google working on something against this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember Google was working on something on the app layer that would guard against this type of connection hijacking but without the setup and teardown overhead of full blown SSL.
Its probably in Google's best interest to get something like this widely deployed -- a lot of ISPs are frothing at the mouth to get Phorm/NebuAd on their networks for more revenue streams, and it won't be long before a Google query would not route to Google (even if done at www.google.com), but to wherever the ISP desires.
Re:Wasn't Google working on something against this (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember Google was working on something on the app layer that would guard against this type of connection hijacking but without the setup and teardown overhead of full blown SSL.
Sounds like you're thinking of the obfuscated tcp [slashdot.org] story. Wasn't so much a Google project as someone who happened to work at Google iirc.
Typical BT Behavior (Score:4, Insightful)
What about wget ? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just plain discusting anyways.
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wget and curl may store cookies, but how would you perform the opt-out procedure in these clients anyway? ;)
My understanding is that you have to opt-out in every client that you use on every system that you own and ensure that the opt-out cookie does not expire and is never cleared. Ironically it's likely that certain pro-privacy software will clear cookies, including the option in Firefox to clear private data on exit.
It's certainly an interesting solution from the good folks at Phorm and BT for giving sub
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Sounds like you need a simple proxy server whose only job is to insert the cookie. Then direct all your clients to use the proxy server. Could even be a transparent proxy in your router.
Frankly, the fact that anyone should need to even consider going to such lengths to make up for such a flawed opt-out system on a disgusting scheme like Phorm (that would suck even if it were opt-in) says a lot about the whole obnoxious setup.
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Re:What about wget ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, if they are basing opt-out on a cookie, they are still doing deep packet inspection, since the cookie isn't in the TCP/IP packet headers (being an application layer thing and all).
I would think that people would want to opt out of Phorm interacting with their data at all, not setting a flag that is essentially "don't use this data for marketting purposes."
Re:What about wget ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats really the key of this all. The cookie prevents it from showing you ads. It does not stop the DPI, and tracking.
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That's just plain discusting anyways.
Well what if I like custard? What of it?
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It occurs to me that it would be nice if Firefox/IE exposed your local cookie data to third party applications through some sort of generalized API call.
I'm sure its not that hard ... but neither is SOCKS support and getting third party apps to support it is still a pain :).
Copyright Infringement? (Score:3)
Since it seems like they store a copy of the websites visited, could a website have a license that is "only end users can keep a copy of the data on this site", and then sue Phorm if they keep the data? Or would their impersonating other servers be fraud, especially if people have the "opt-out" cookie?
Looking at the wiki diagram [wikipedia.org] of what they do, that is just insane. They are a man in the middle, adding cookies, hiding cookies, redirecting requests to unrelated sites, etc. They are slowing down every site, and what happens if they get overloaded? Does everything come to a halt?
Imagine if someone got a server on a network and added an entry to webwise.net to the /etc/hosts file (or equivalent), they would get a record of every site that everyone with the extra DNS entry visited. Combine a server with a DNS poisoning attack, and you can get the traffic for a large number of people.
Maybe people should point www.webwise.net to a non-routing address to be safe?
Re:Copyright Infringement? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is absolutely no way in which this isn't copyright infringement. Any web page is copyrighted. This comment is copyrighted and owned by me. The Slashdot terms of use say that they get a nonexclusive distribution right to them. No one else has the right to reproduce them or modify them. The complete page is also copyrighted and owned jointly by all of the posters and by Slashdot.
A carrier has an implicit license to distribute exact copies to their customers and, if the correct headers are set, to cache a copy. Inserting adverts, however, is creating and distributing a derived work from the copyrighted material. Since they profit from the adverts, it counts as commercial infringement, which typically has much larger financial penalties.
The maximum fine for online copyright infringement in the UK is now £5,000 per offence. Every single page that is modified counts as an instance of infringement. The total fines would come to more than the market capitalisation of BT at the moment.
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There is absolutely no way in which this isn't copyright infringement. Any web page is copyrighted. This comment is copyrighted and owned by me. The Slashdot terms of use say that they get a nonexclusive distribution right to them. No one else has the right to reproduce them or modify them. The complete page is also copyrighted and owned jointly by all of the posters and by Slashdot.
A carrier has an implicit license to distribute exact copies to their customers and, if the correct headers are set, to cache
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Re:Copyright Infringement? (Score:4, Informative)
Please mod this and all similar posts down (nothing personal TheRaven64).
Phorm is not "Inserting adverts [and thus] creating and distributing a derived work from the copyrighted material."
It is performing a man-in-the-middle attack to glean information from all ISP subscribers, and using that information to serve 'tageted adverts' on PARTICIPATING websites; sites that have signed up to use Phorm as an advertising provider.
The only copyright infringement that might occur is that Phorm scrapes websites (by hijacking the ISP subscriber's session) but does not respect the robot text. It can therefore (arguably) be said to be in breach of a website's usage agreement.
Phorm have said that they respect the robot.txt restrictions only in agregate: where no robots are allowed they will not go, but if ANY specific spidering is allowed, they (wrongly) calim that they are also allowed.
Phorm (and apparently also BT) are scum. I pray that they're found guilty of computer misuse, but this will have to be the result of a ruling by the EU (rather than the incompetent British government).
It goes without saying that, should this happen, the guilty parties will not serve jail time (since they are corporate and rich with contacts in the government) but hopefully, the immoral and corrupt spyware scheme that BT is creating with Phorm will be stopped.
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Inserting adverts, however, is creating and distributing a derived work from the copyrighted material
I am not a lawyer, but what could one say if they said that by merely putting your copyrighted material and their adverts next to each other without changing your material they are only putting two copyright works in a collection rather than creating a derived work? I have the impression that mere collections or aggregations of copyrighted works are not the same as derived works.
I don't mean to support them or anything like that, but only to see what defence one could use against a claim such as that.
You don't need BT at all (Score:5, Informative)
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Tiscali are quite keen to get you to switch everything to them, as are TalkTalk. But TalkTalk are also involved in Phorm so don't switch to them.
We don't - there are 4 (Score:2)
The BT network is in fact so poor in our area that I do all my deployment update downloads for our company at home on Virgin (20Mbit/s downloads) and thus get better total download speeds than our office BT business lines.
Although BT is officially a private company, it cannot really be one because national infrastructure runs over its lines
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Why don't you name the companies who are providing your connections? Have they requested your silence on the matter?
Perhaps an Enterprising Brit could make cash? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a company could do, assuming it had the cash for reasonable Internet peering, would be to make a VPN service. Give directions for novice BT users to set up and route through. It doesn't have to be an "anonymous" service, however it would be a boon for privacy if TCP/IP logs are held just long enough in case of a security issue (or to make the UK government happy), and then promptly deleted. This service would be hosted physically in the UK to ensure decently fast connections, as opposed to other services located elsewhere around the world where packets would possibly have to cross through high latency overseas lines.
It could offer the usual PPTP services. It can also offer a SSL proxy (plain or using stunnel) for Web traffic so only the Web browser would have to be configured if the user doesn't have administrative rights. For users using ssh, it can offer PPP over ssh.
Then, this company can provide some decent instructions for people to set up a VPN to its site with the usual operating systems (Linux, OS X, BSD, Windows.)
Of course, BT could try to block or throttle the packets, but that is starting a type of legal battle with another company that may not be in BT's interest.
Re:Perhaps an Enterprising Brit could make cash? (Score:5, Informative)
I personally know an enterprising Scot making a decent stack on this concept.
https://www.vpntunnel.co.uk/ [vpntunnel.co.uk]
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Why not just switch to another ISP? Nobody is forced to use BT.
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Why not just switch to another ISP? Nobody is forced to use BT.
Because half the other ISPs on the market are openly using this, the other half probably are but haven't announced it.
Re:Perhaps an Enterprising Brit could make cash? (Score:4, Informative)
Why not just switch to another ISP? Nobody is forced to use BT.
In some parts of the UK, especially in rural areas, BT is indeed the only provider. I can't imagine how they manage to sell any broadband at all in urban areas where there actually is competition: they're quite expensive, and their support is shockingly awful.
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tech support forum (Score:2)
So find a forum somewhere else that can be used for all the legal/moral/ethical/boycott/etc issues. If there isn't one, make one (rent a server).
I thought Phorm had to be Opt-in (Score:3, Interesting)
Glad I Left (Score:3, Interesting)
Central point of failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
What would happen if the webwise.net domain (which shares an IP with phorm.com) was to accidentally get DDOSed?
Going by the Phorm diagram on wikipedia, it would seem that webwise.net is a central point of failure for the system.
Injection warnings (Score:3, Informative)
It's about time that all http web traffic was https instead, so the likes of BT could not inject their garbage into pages without people knowing the pages have been compromised.
Hit BT for copyright violation (Score:2)
IANAL nor do I know how UK copyright law works but why doesn't someone who owns a website (preferably one involving paid content or something) and who also has an account with BT visit their website via their BT connection, have all the inserted ads come up and then sue BT for copyright violation.
Have they not learned? (Score:2)
I can't believe that whoever handles this stuff for BT isn't aware of the "Streisand Effect." Maybe their PR staff had nothing to do with it.
It's the stupidest thing you can do these days, tring to censor your customer base in public like that.
It's one of the things that really makes me feel good about the internet, and one of the few phenomenons in these times where people can organize (without even organizing) and change the behavior of a corporate behemoth.
It must drive authoritarian corporations and gov
Copyright Issue (Score:3, Insightful)
They are effectively modifying content in such a way that what is presented, is not what was published
There could also be some issues effecting the value of the content. I create content, and BT defaces it before it reaches my client/consumer, they are in a sense effectively damaging my property and assets. If I was a large website owner I might take offense to this kind of behavior.
What about content creator's rights? (Score:2)
As a web author:
-> I did NOT give them permission to place or inject their ads on *my* site.
-> I have no control over what ads are delivered with my content -- some of it may be counter to things I beleive, and some ads may imply an endorsement of products, people or policies that I abhor.
-> I am not recieving ad revenues from their ad hits which my site geneates for them.
To me, this is outright theft of my content to generate revenue for them. I beleive the legal term is "conversion", taking some
You know... (Score:2)
I wonder why these types of companies aren't doing away with cookies altogether and getting their clients to install a completely server-side monitoring system.
Nobody would even have a cookie to delete in that case.
Opt out a whole site? (Score:2)
Can a site admin request that nothing form a given site be looked at, or will I have to put up with the private forum I visit (not to mention every IRC network and MUD, which can't be opted out of at all) being spied on because a single person forgot to opt out?
Privacy Issue? (Score:2)
I don't know about the UK's views on it, but I'm pretty sure this is a colossal privacy issue that SHOULD run afoul of consumer protection and privacy laws. If this starts to show up here in Canada, you could expect a pretty significant uproar and an appeal to the government to stop this sort of thing before it becomes habit.
Are there no privacy laws in the UK? Is it seriously that bad?
Re:Just a thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
If it were done with the consent of the content creators, there would be little or no benefit over google ads.
Re:Just a thought... (Score:4, Informative)
That appears to be the case:
KentErtugrul
Just to clarify: we do not serve adverts into the traffic stream. The websites within which the ads appear are in fact our partners. They choose to partner with us to bring you more helpful, relevant and yes, more valuable advertising
http://www.webwise.com/how-it-works/transcript_080306.html
Re:Just a thought... (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent (insightful and informed AC) up.
As much as I hate Phorm (luckily I'm not with a Phorm ISP), that's not entirely accurate. As mentioned by an AC (but likely to get lost) Phorm only modifies the ad selection for the Phorm advertising network. It does not strip out other ads and replace them with their own (although it wouldn't surprise me if someone had suggested that), it just tries to target ads from a select network of advertisers.
That said, it does still piggy-back any content that I put up on my website by reading it and gaining marketting data from it. I sure as hell didn't agree to that, so I'm investigating methods of stopping them profiting from my content when I don't get a cut and when I purposefully don't put adverts on my sites.
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Gah, I meant the GP's "modifying content without permission" isn't accurate. The AC's comments are accurate (complete with a reference!)
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- Invasion of privacy for both webmaster and user (not all web content is static, they could be looking at pages meant only for the user)
- That being said, could the information that the ISP is gathering be considered private? Could it be covered by wiretapping laws or something similar?
Whether the server is using HTTPS or not, if a site requires a login, that could be considered to be an attempt to secure it. I
Re:Just a thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that my TV doesn't track what I watch, who I watch it with, who I talk to, what mail I send and when I go to the bathroom.
Re:Just a thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
...yet...
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Re: Tracking Age! (Score:2)
We're just settling into the century of Tracking Everything because it's Fun!
Let's assuming you are a male weighing between 175 and 200 lbs, getting somewhat less exercise than you should, eating somewhat less fiber than you should, but with a bonus modifier for having some fruit and a metabolism a touch above normal.
Given an example nominal 22oz of type-2 material per week, Pi divided by the number of type-2 rest visits per week gives the percent chance modifier that you will overload the residential grade
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Unless you plug a Tivo into it.
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LOL @ Troll. I forgot that on slashdot, unpopular opinion = troll mod-down.
fucktards
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and they're allowed to censor whatever they want from their customer forum
And we're allowed to call them out on it.
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does anyone know why they have to implement it with cookies and redirects? (according to wikipedia)
couldn't they have done this silently and leave users completely unaware of it?
As far as I can gather, it's not BT doing the dirty work. They simply route all HTTP traffic through the Phorm system, and their processes are set up so there's no way to filter whose traffic gets routed that way.
By the time it reaches the Phorm system, it may well not be associated with any specific BT user - Phorm don't know who has what IP address - so the only realistic option for them to use something at the application level.
If anything, it's an indictment of our data protection laws that customer ri
Re:cookie (Score:4, Interesting)
If it went to court, any customer in the UK would be able to get away with terminating their contract on these grounds. I would recommend a formal notification of terminating the contract, the clear reasons why and the promise that this would be resolved via legal action if they chose to pursue you. I would also promise legal action if they in anyway impeded my freedom to move to another ISP.
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If it went to court, any customer in the UK would be able to get away with terminating their contract on these grounds. I would recommend a formal notification of terminating the contract, the clear reasons why and the promise that this would be resolved via legal action if they chose to pursue you. I would also promise legal action if they in anyway impeded my freedom to move to another ISP.
This won't happen just because it's front page news on a few news for nerds websites - put simply, not enough people know about it.
It needs to be in the more hysterical tabloid press as frontpage news : "BT SPIES ON MILLIONS OF CUSTOMERS!!!111oneoneone" type of thing - every day for a week. Then we'll see some real action.
Otherwise you're just one customer in a sea of millions who don't know enough to give a fuck.