“For every IT breakthrough, an army of scandalised paranoiacs stands ready with a banning order,” wrote columnist James Woudhuysen, although not recently enough to be talking about Phorm: this was IT Week five years back.
But not much seems to have changed. Woudhuysen was talking about RFID tags, and the need to track stock. He was able to quote no less a guru than Bill Joy of Sun as supporting this technology.
By contrast, Phorm is an advertising tool designed to make the lives of “targets” easier. But to do that, it needs to know some of their preferences. Stories have quoted no less a luminary than Privacy International’s Simon Davies as saying that “it’s a privacy-friendly technology” and yet still the excitement about spyware grows.
Who’s excited about these things? It’s not just the usual suspects of woolly liberals or anti-business lobbies, it seems. Joy definitely falls into the woolly liberal category normally, and most TV producers would probably put Davies into the same filing cabinet drawer.
There seems to be good evidence that much of the Phorm functionality is derived from technology developed by 121Media, which started out as PeopleOnPage, which was just trying to show “who else is browsing the page you’re looking at” and subsequently found itself blocked by Symantec and F-Secure as spyware.
“The ISP does not give Phorm personally identifiable information like IP addresses, but does share the information that the computer this cookie is on is looking at car sites right now. OIX [Open Internet Exchange] serves up car ads,” wrote Wendy Grossman on her net.wars blog. As such, it contrasts favourably with Google’s approach, which “stores browsing data and ties it to login IDs and IP addresses”.
The danger, of course, doesn’t lie in the technology, but in who is allowed to access it. The one party that should be officially and vigorously banned from accessing and storing user data of this sort is government. Government oppression needs little help from powerful database technologies showing user preferences and habits; it’s all too easy already.
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