Seen in the New York Times:
The company, called Phorm, has created a tool that can track every single online action of a given consumer, based on data from that person’s Internet service provider. The trick for Phorm is to gain access to that data, and it is trying to negotiate deals with telephone and cable companies, like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, that provide broadband service to millions.[...]
Phorm is not the first company to realize that providers of broadband services are sitting on deep caches of consumer data. Other advertising companies like Front Porch, NebuAd, Adzilla and Project Rialto are trying to do much the same thing. What distinguishes Phorm is the success — and scrutiny — it has had in the British market.
Three major Internet service providers in Britain — BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media — have signed on to work with Phorm, which is incorporated in Delaware and was founded in 2002. Phorm says that these deals give it access to the Web-surfing habits of 70 percent of the British households with broadband.
A couple of thoughts:
First…I wonder how many people suspect that something like this was already going on. For example, part of my internet access comes from a provider that has willingly cooperated with the NSA on warrantless wiretaps; it’s relatively easy to imagine a log of traffic being compiled on a person like me.
Second…the article reads like Phorm is largely cookie based. Surely, there’s a Firefox plugin available to combat the technology. (And surely enough, there is.
Also, a bit of Googling around turns up other, troubling information about Phorm. For example, consider this post at Techdirt:
Phorm is now aggressively defending its reputation, insisting once again that it will keep all of the data it collects anonymized. However, while it says this and explains how it will try to anonymize the data, the company fails to address the fact that just about every time a company has tried to create an anonymized data set, it doesn’t take long for someone to de-anonymize it. The company just assumes that it really can keep the data anonymous, when there are serious doubts as to whether or not that’s really possible.
…and a comment in this post at The Register:
Phorm is run by Kent Ertegrul, a serial entrepreneur whose past ventures include selling joyrides on Russian fighter jets. Previously, his most notable foray online was as the founder of PeopleOnPage, an ad network that operated earlier in the decade and which was blacklisted as spyware by the likes of Symantec and F-Secure.