Bad Phorm?

There is a bit of a stink being stirred up at the moment over a new online advertising service called Phorm. It's an online advertising platform that works like this: ISPs will scan the text of content downloaded by web surfers, analyze it and insert relevant ads on participating sites. Presumably ISPs will receive some of the advertising income for their participation in this scheme, which will help keep down the costs of web access. Predictably it is the ISPs with the most aggressive pricing that have signed up for this. But a lot of consumers are not happy about it, saying that it invades their privacy, and some security experts have even claimed it breaches data privacy laws.

Being a pragmatist, I don't see what all the fuss is about. People are already used to the idea of seeing ads related to what they are browsing, thanks to Google AdSense. They are happy to sign up to Google's excellent free email service Gmail, and accept it serving up ads related to the contents of their emails (I love the links to recipes for processed pork that appear when I browse the Spam folder!) without thinking too deeply about the fact that Google must know what their emails about in order to do this.

The only difference is in the way the technology works. Google crawls the websites that participate in AdSense in advance, in order to determine what ads to display. Phorm is actually monitoring the data stream that is being downloaded in real time. This seems a bit inefficient to me, but presumably allows the ads to be more specifically targeted by building up a picture of what a user is interested in over several sites. If I'm going to see ads, I'd rather they were about things I might be interested in. I think that AdSense, used the way we do it on tech-pro.net (i.e. not trying to force people to click on ads by shoving them under their noses) actually complements the content by providing useful extra relevant links for visitors to follow up if they are interested.

A lot of the indignation has to do with the fact that a third party is scanning what you surf. But people forget - or just don't realize - that this is pretty much happening already. You have an account with your ISP, they know when you were online, what IP address was allocated to you at this time, and almost certainly they keep logs showing what sites you visited. Governments require them to keep this information, and can demand to access it. I think it's a good thing. It helps law enforcement agencies to track terrorist activity or get evidence to convict pedophiles. Nobody is going to bother to use this information to compile a profile on ordinary, law-abiding me or you, because nobody is that interested in us as individuals.

If you are really worried about what information people have about you, stop using the web. Don't use the phone (phone companies log the numbers you call) and especially don't use a mobile, because they can track where you are even if you don't use it!

Phorm is just a way for Internet service providers and web site owners to make money, that helps pay for the free services you enjoy and keeps the cost down of others. If you think Phorm is bad form, pay a bit more and switch to an ISP that will pledge not to use it.

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