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Weeble
Starscape Jedi
Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 1139
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
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 Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 6:37 pm Post subject: The Phorm Phiasco |
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Apparently all the big ISPs in the UK are rolling out a system to send a copy of every web page we look at to a marketing company called Phorm. But don't worry! They care about your privacy and promise to delete the information after they've scoured it for marketing data. What's worse, it sounds like BT trialled the system secretly, and from the reports, it seems to work by injecting stuff into the HTML pages you request, and the injected stuff makes a bunch of extra requests to aid them spying on you. So not only does it invade your privacy, but it can slow down or break the web-pages (or maybe anything else you get over http) you visit. Who's going to handle *that* tech-support nightmare?
I am really unhappy, and haven't heard anything yet from Virgin (my ISP) that makes me feel any better. There's supposed to be an opt-out system, but I have a terrible feeling that it still leaves everything in place and just means that (they say) they won't save the marketing data.
Here's a bunch of related links, of varying technical detail and sensationalism. I can't find the stuff I read about the trials, but the gist of it was a bunch of people formatting several good systems trying to eradicate what they thought was a spyware or virus infection, only to discover that the websites were being rewritten by their ISP (BT), and not by their computer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/internet.privacy
http://www.badphorm.co.uk/page.php?2
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/phorm_ripa/
This link is to a petition someone started on the prime-ministers petition site to encourage them to do something about it.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ispphorm/ |
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Fost
Pod Team
Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 3734
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| Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 7:06 pm Post subject: |
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Presumably they inject a web bug into the page. maybe blockable using Adblock or just hosts.ini redirects.
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Weeble
Starscape Jedi
Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 1139
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
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| Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 8:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Possibly, although it's all a bit vague. And the thing that annoys me is that even if you can protect your privacy, if they're re-writing stuff you request via http it seems to have the potential to mess up all sorts of dynamic content and other applications that use http to communicate. I mean, maybe they have an amazing solution that has taken every eventuality into consideration and can do no harm. But I'm not feeling particularly inclined to trust them right now. |
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Chrisj
Joined: 28 Oct 2006
Posts: 95
Location: Oxford, UK
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| Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2008 9:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Fost wrote: | Presumably they inject a web bug into the page. maybe blockable using Adblock or just hosts.ini redirects.
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Sadly not; it's far, far worse than that. The ISPs in question are handing your http requests (and a scary quantity of other information) over to Phorm for analysis and ad-targeting, basically. And it's being done by their routers, rather than anything that ought to be paying attention to page requests, so you can't even escape it by using alternative DNS or proxy-avoidance. There's lots of detail in The Register's articles on the subject. AFAIR, the system basically eats your first request for each page, and lets the browser's automatic retries through, but I might have misremembered.
Thankfully, atm it's just BT,ntl, and Talktalk(=Carphone Warehouse), so anyone who wants a decent ISP is probably not affected anyway. But....
Last edited by Chrisj on Sun Mar 09, 2008 1:18 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Weeble
Starscape Jedi
Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 1139
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
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| Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 12:03 am Post subject: |
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They answered some more questions, which look as though they'd be re-assuring if you could believe them, but I don't think they're being honest.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7283333.stm
They claim that "we do not modify web pages or inject ads", but also that "the data capture system only stores one item of information on your computer – a random number". This number is supposed to be stored as a cookie, but the only way for the data capture system – the part that analyses all your web browsing – to store or request this cookie is by rewriting third party web-pages. It seems they must be lying somewhere, because their answers are simply inconsistent. |
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