What does the Council /Af agencies have to say about Phorm ?

[muto33]

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I read with interest that the way internet advertsing is delivered to customers is going to change - and all advertsing is going to be managed by a company elected by the ISP -i.e popular ISP's like BT, Virgin Media, Talk Talk. etc.

From reading there website I noted this:

"Advertising that’s relevant to your interests
Webwise assigns a unique, randomly-generated number in a cookie to a customer’s browser to preserve anonymity, then matches the categories of browsing activity with advertising. When there is a match the customer sees the more-relevant ad."

What I'm intersted in knowing is when Phorm changes the cookie and the advert "to a more relevant ad" are they removing the cookie of the affiliate that paid to have their cookie put there ?

Is everyone that connects to the internet that uses BT as a service provider (for example) going to be given a piece of browser software that effectively takes affiliate commissions from the original advertizers ? - and if so is Affiliate dead - unless you join up with the new self appointed adleader/super affiliate ?

It seems to me - this former spyware company 'turned good' ? has made itself a new butt hole to crawl out of

thoughts anyone ?

[drivetowin]

From what I've read I haven't seen anything to suggest that this is going to overwrite affiliate cookies.

What it is doing, is that if you visit a site who have signed up to Phorm to provide their advertising that it will then display relevant advertising based upon your previous browsing.

It does not (and I can't really see how it could) change the adverts shown on any affiliate's websites unless and until that affiliate has signed up to Phorm and placed their adserving code on the afiliate's website.

Yes I think it is a potential concern but at the moment a very very small concern.

[muto33]

a site who have signed up to Phorm to provide their advertising

- What would happen if I visited say ARGOS on-line as a customer and I had phorm on my browser but i got there via an affiliate link of 'bob smith' I found in google in an adwords ad - when phorm put their cookie on the argos website (with Argos permission and the customer) - who gets the commission - bob smith or phorm ?

It would be interesting to here from a techie person as to if a browser based gadget could in theory take over the adverts on a website (rather like adblocker tools do) and replace them all with there own adverts - needing just the permission of the customer - regardless of the webmaster. - it would look better than pop up windows and browser redirects.

I take it phorm are planning to recruit large amounts of webmasters to sign up to this new type of advertsing ? - as there are more than just their adverts to choose from.

[moredial]

Wander over to badphorm.co.uk and read through the forum posts there.

For those who don't have the time: the phorm script intercepts all traffic from the ISP via three 307 redirects which send forged cookies to customer's computers and also strip out some forged cookies from headers before the final 307 redirect delivers the site requested.

There is an interesting post on how the Opera browser appears to get into a knot over all the 307 redirects and ends up rejecting cookies from the legitimate site.

When traffic is intercepted in this way, you can't rely on the server delivering what is expected.

The other profilers in the market have been injecting adverts into web pages - about 1% of all USA traffic monitored by one university project is modified from the original and that with only 10% of US internet users currently sitting behind profiling scripts hosted at the ISP level.

Just make sure that anyone who visits your site knows that they need to tell their ISP to drop any ideas about intercepting traffic and you may still be in business next year.

[Barry]

What you say sounds quite serious. So an estimated 10% of USA web users are seeing modification of websites before it reaches them and even worse thats any changes are happening at an ISP level rather than by local applications/malware/spyware.

I think its def something to keep our eye on here in the UK.

[drivetowin]

I think it is worth saying that the report in the link you have given (and it's a very interesting read for the technically minded) - in paragraph 63:

"Early speculation about the Phorm system suggested that it added adverts to web pages, or replaced them on the fly". This is not what happens, the specially targeted adverts only appear on participating websites.

And in paragraph 64:

A website that contains adverts that come from Phorm's \OIX" network will place into their webpages some HTML such as <img src="http://webwise.net/advert">, much
as they would do today with existing advertising systems. In practice there may be other stuff going on, but in essence it is this simple.

Those are the words of the independent expert, not me, but it would seem to reinforce the point that Phorm will not change the webpage served by an affiliate website unless you have signed up to serve Phorm ads.

[kier]

I think it's also outrageous in the extreme that ISPs have let this company monitor our internet useage without anyone actively consenting. :td

[moredial]

"Early speculation about the Phorm system suggested that it added adverts to web pages, or replaced them on the fly". This is not what happens, the specially targeted adverts only appear on participating websites.

You are right, that is what makes Phorm the 'best of the bunch' from the webmaster's point of view. It does not mean that the concept of interception for personal data mining and profiling based on the advertising, marketing and promotion work of the webmaster is any more acceptable.

If you read through the promotion blurb on adzilla, nebuad and frontporch you will see that they are the ones modifying pages. As free-hotspots uses them to fund the free wi-fi in UK, page changes or pop-ups before your page is displayed is a possibility.

I keep asking if anyone uses free-hotspots (why would anyone use a service where you have to disable WEP?) but nothing found anywhere on any blogs about what, if any, changes happen. So little is known about the 'rest of the pack'. If Phorm is the 'best', how bad are the rest?

[Mogga]

We've got Be internet and Nic says they've been doing something funny with their dns server. It stopped son getting any webpages he hasn't got the IP cached. It made me wonder how much control ISPs could have over ads we see/

[Donk]

I'm not too sure IAB would make a comment about one of it's own members.

IAB UK : Members community : Membership directory : P : Phorm Inc

Bob

[moredial]

I'm not too sure IAB would make a comment about one of it's own members.

IAB UK : Members community : Membership directory : P : Phorm Inc

Bob

They have only been members for a few weeks. A comment about why they have been accepted as members could be interesting, if you have any contacts with the IAB.

It is probably the same as Google being members of the USA organisation of anti-spyware vendors and interested parties which helps decide which tracking cookies to allow and which to block.