Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Rejects Tracking
kernowyon writes "The BBC has an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee during his visit to the UK on their website currently.
In it, he voices his concern about the practice of tracking activity on the internet — with particular reference to Phorm.
Quotes Sir Tim with regard to his data — "It's mine — you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me.""
...but will it have any effect on powers that are in charge? As for influence on us, most users who know who he is already share this position.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I agree with ol' Tim. An ISP's job is to provide a pipe for the Internet, charge for usage, and stay out of the way. That's all.
Unless I want them to do something else. And tracking me is not something I want. That's right, spam filtering is something else that I want to be "opt-in", and content filtering, and every other bloody sort of filtering.
Actually though, I would be happy if they paid me, but for one week at a time. For that one week I'll happily browse Goatse, Goatshe, Tubgirl etc. (images downloaded, but not displayed, I'm not that crazy). Any real browsing I'll do via my own encrypted proxy set-up at my webhost.
Basically, I'm not the target audience for tracking.
Anyway, it's great to see this sort of issue on mainstream media. Now just to get the 'normal' people to read it...
I wank in the shower.
Sure this isn't a typo?? :-)
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Quite honestly, if they want to track my internet usage, and exert some control over my online experience, then they can.
In return, I want high speed internet access to be provided free of change, with no download limit.
Sound fair?
I will allow you to track it and to use it in house, but the moment a third party touches it or you attempt to sell it, I want a share of the profits.
Also, if you make me pay a subscription fee (or like slashdot, if I was to choose to), and you STILL sell want to sell my data, I also want a share of the profits.
I also want a list of all the organisations you supply my information to and I also do not want them to be able to resell it without observing the above conditions: I get a share in the profits, I get to see who the sell it to, people they sell it to have to... etc
This is the only way I would be happy to allow tracking.
I don't know that the usage of "quotes" is correct in that submission (I am seriously wondering if someone with access to a more comprehensive dictionary could find out for me).
Certainly, "Quoth" would be correct in its place -- but archaic -- or just "Said".
Kent Ertugrul, chief executive, of Phorm, told BBC News: "We have not had the chance to describe to Tim Berners-Lee how the system works and we look forward to doing that.
You think you need to explain how your tracker works to the father of the internet , and that once you do, he'll be ok with it. Boy, if that ain't arrogance right there, I don't know what is.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
After having read the article, I would have to agree with Tim. Where I go on the 'tubes is none of my ISPs business. And this is not about trying to hide some illicit activity, but a defense of my right to live without being watched everywhere I go. I must say, though, that I am not surprised to see this coming out of England. When are its citizens going to finally stand up for their rights and put and end to all of the cameras and tracking? V's speech begins to come to mind.
Bearded Dragon
You fail.
Perhaps the old hacker trick of lowering your signal/noise ratio via injecting bad/misleading data (somewhere in the flow)? If you can't be very quiet, you can usually benefit from being very loud.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
In TFA's page source is:
:bbc -->
<!-- Code for
<!-- START NetRatings Measurement V5.1 -->
<!-- COPYRIGHT 2003 NetRatings Limited -->
NetRatings being a tracking service of some sort.
Anyway. I always wondered about the philosophical implications of allowing someone to own the vibrations in the air. What I mean is, if someone makes the air around me vibrate in a particular way, I'm not allowed to observe it as I wish. One way of observing the vibrations would be to observe the effect those vibrations have on a particular machine. Call it a "recording machine".
The same goes for photons that impact my body. I'm not allowed to observe them in arbitrary ways, only in certain prescribed ways.
The reason such a strange rule makes sense, they say, is that the vibrations and photons aren't the real issue, the thing in question is the *meaning* of those phenomena. Those phenomena represent "performance".
So ok. I hereby attach meaning to every single action that I make for the rest of my life. They are to be considered a performance. Anyone seeking to observe or record my actions without my consent is hereby committing a copyright violation.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Jack Valenti? Is that you?
Seriously. I skimmed the summary, and thought this article was something completely different.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Phorm should be easily defeated. Just need a script to "harvest" various random sites, and have the script running in the background, clicking away merrily. Phorm will track this random spew and will not be able to differentiate your real traffic from the "noise".
Should call this script/program DEPHORM, guess it could easily ruin some halfwits dreams of embarrassing riches!
Legally, we are coming to a conflict between what companies like Phorm say consumers have agreed to give and what consumers say they have agreed to give. Tracking companies like Phorm will say consumers agreed to their terms of service that allow tracking. But consumers can publish their own privacy terms of use that legally forbid tracking. [This idea is not legal advice to anyone, just something to think about.]
Benjamin Wright, Dallas, Texas, benjaminwright.us
Believe it or not, the Internet, just like Electricity, is NOT a given right.
We enter into a contract, pay some money, and get a service.
If you dont want to be tracked, profiled, and served steaming hot piles of ads, then build your own network, backbone, etc and see how far you can go with that.
The other option is to simply not use the Internet or find someone with a contract/TOS you can live with but as long as there is money on the table (feeding you ads) tracking and profiling will always be one board meeting away.
In a perfect world, maybe it is your data. In the real world, you dont own the network, the board of directors, or any part of their business. In the end, it is theirs to do with as *they* please and your right to walk away as *you* please.
For those of us outside merry old Englande, Merry Olde Yew Nark, or Merry Old Moosecow (IN soviet... never mind) Wikipedia says "Phorm, formerly known as 121Media, is a digital technology based in London, New York and Moscow. The company drew attention when it announced it was is in talks with some United Kingdom ISPs to deliver targeted advertising based on a user's profile."
Am I the only one who had to look it up? I thought "Is phorming like phishing"?
For the humorless cretin who mods me down for linking uncyclopedia, since there is no uncyclopedia entry for Phorm I'll link something that sounds similar.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I am not against my ISP tracking which sites I visit. In fact, I would not mind a summarized list of the sites my family visits and how long they are online. Phone companies automatically track which phone numbers I dial, why cannot it be the same for ISPs?
I am, however, vehemently against sharing that data with other companies. Of course, unless the ISP is providing me with tracking information, any information that they would track would be useless to them unless they do share it with others.
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
So... that 'accept cookies from sites' checkbox in my options menu isn't an on/off switch then?
Is it not copyright ?
After all - I need do nothing to cause anything original that I write or say to be copyright, would that not extend to patterns that I make as I walk around, or sequences of web sites I visit or some other such original act that I perpetrate.
What if it turned out that the sequence of URLs I visited was a poem.
slashdot.org/there/was/a/young/man/from/Venus
google.com/who/had/an/enormous... etc.
Nullius in verba
About as much as Westinghouse could do about alternating current being used to electrocute criminals, or Lee de Forest could do about television commercials, or Leo Szilard could do about the atomic bomb being used against Japan.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Hi all As the name suggests I work for the Phorm Comms Team. In response to Tim's comments and the raft of commentary tht has followed, we also believe that it is wrong to store Internet users' personal data. Our technology is a real turning point in the protection of privacy online - it does not store personally identifiable information, does not store IP addresss and nor does it store browsing histories. By contrast, ad targeting from other major Internet companies means that potentially identifiable personal data is stored for over 12 months before it is even anonymised. Also, because these companies reach nearly all UK Internet users, consumers effectively have no real choice about being targeted in this way. With the Phorm technology, users can choose - they can opt out or in at any time; and again, no personal data is stored . We look forward to speaking to Tim Berners Lee to explain how our technology is a ground breaking advance in delivering targeted ads while protecting privacy online and consumer choice, as we have with other experts.
We've been doing some tracking recently, but aimed at the advertiser side. We have a plug-in for Firefox which rates ads. A little icon is displayed next to each ad, showing what our system knows about the advertiser. As we tell users of the plug in, "AdRater 'phones home', but tells us as little as possible. AdRater sends the domain name associated with each advertisment you see to SiteTruth." SiteTruth then sends back advertiser information, in XML, which the plug-in turns into icons.
We use this to find out what the advertisers are doing. Individuals are entitled to privacy; advertisers are not. We're building up a picture of the on-line advertising market. We now have, for example, a list of Google's AdSense advertisers.
Soon we'll be issuing reports on advertiser quality. (Ads on Bloomberg: mostly legit. Ads on LinkedIn: quality varies, mostly OK. Ads on MySpace: mostly bottom-feeders.) More on this in coming weeks.
It's not just advertisers tracking users any more. Sometimes it's the other way round.
The Foundation for Information Policy Research has recently published an open letter in which it argues that the Phorm system that many British ISPs have signed up to is illegal. I am definitely having no regrets about having emigrated from the U.K. to Denmark.
What kind of parent are you? Your kids are all vandals, taking drugs, driving around drunk, and causing trouble all over town. Please ground them or cut off their allowance or something.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Ah, Mr. Berners-Lee?
Concerned about being tracked?
Why just on the internet?
What about off of the internet, you know, away from your computer?
Do you pay cash for all your financial transactions?
I thought not...
OWNED!
uh... I mean tracked!
Here are the notes I took from a sales pitch to a client. Although NDAs were passed around, all of the technical and business consulting staff refused to sign them, so this information is freely available and can in no way be considered a trade secret. Some of my notes come from other people's observations in the ensuing PR war. Phorm's sales teams have been aggressively targeting large ISPs with low margins around Europe and the US in the last year or so. They only pitch to board level decision makers, and like to avoid providing any technical detail whenever possible.
Phorm has hired a specialty PR company, Citigate Dewe Rogerson to alter public perception of any complaints found in blogs, news programs, and on technical sites. They have been aggressively pasting boilerplate responses about the legality of the system, using carefully sanitized language to obfuscate the debate. The company specialises in mastering public opinion as part of crisis management during corporate fiascos. They may be employing a few companies like this, I've seen Dutch, German and French language follow-up posts in the last few weeks.
Phorm has addressed the main part of pesky privacy laws in Europe by "gifting" the collection equipment to the ISP using a standard 5 year depreciation schedule. The interception and initial filtering kit officially becomes property of the ISP, but is installed, maintained, configured and run by Phorm's technical team. If the equipment stays 5 years in the ISP's premises, then it becomes the full property of the ISP. The ISP can claim to privacy oversight groups that the equipment belongs to them, and that all the personal information hasn't left their network should post-analysis show the customer has "opted-out" of passing the information to Phorm's China-based servers. The data is still captured and analyzed, just not all of it is passed to Phorm.
The Phorm collectors sit inside the ISP's network, and collect all internet traffic from all clients all the time. Web traffic is directed to machines that analyze the request, and respond with some HTML code redirecting the browser to one of the many domains operated by Phorm. The code can be customised depending on browser string to put an invisible iframe or other HTML structure surrounding the subsequent web pages. The redirect is to trick the browser into sending cookies associated with one of the many Phorm domains, and to accept new cookies. Once the cookies are read and re-written, more HTML code is sent to once again redirect the browser to try the original request, which then passes through the ISP's network to the internet. This is how Phorm claims to read the opt-out cookies should they exist. No cookies returned is considered opt-in at this point.
The problem I, and others, had with Phorm's plan was that they leave some kind of HTML trick code running in the browser session to track all subsequent web traffic and to allow them to intercept anything they believe to be relevant.
As an example, let's take an ordinary, un-intercepted session to slashdot.org. The browser sends an HTML request to the slashdot servers, which respond with code asking about cookies which can be used to display a customised page for logged-in slashdot users. The browser can't be tricked by slashdot's servers to return cookies from digg or google.
With Phorm, the initial HTML request to slashdot.org gets intercepted by the Phorm equipment, which respond with a 302 redirect to spyware.ru, the browser then does a lookup and redirect to the new site. Note, that at this point, no traffic has managed to escape the ISP and get to the internet. At this point, the Phorm interceptor machine can also respond to the DNS lookup for malware.ru with the correct address for slashdot.org, to prevent any kind of local firewalling based on known bad networks. The browser tries to get to malware.ru with the new address, and once again the Phorm equipment returns some HTML code. This is where the serious trouble begi
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
To all you ISP exec's that might be reading this dialog: I'd pay $5/mo more if you'd anonymize my use of the internet (in a way I can verify) and if your service terms stated that I was anonymized in very clear language (ie. no legalese loopholes). - p
Good point; make sure script doesn't request any page content other than the index/plain text. Like elinks, I guess. That and a little bit of common sense dictionary filtering and/or metadata tags. Although I see where you were going on the whole with it... I haven't the foggiest idea how to make sure I don't land on a page that puts me on a government list somewhere :). Any ideas?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Convinced us it is common place to get discounts for reviling your information to them. Everyone: Safeway, Albertsons, Fred Myer, and QFC have a "card" to get you discounts. What do you think they do with the data? Not look at the personal stuff? I would hate to think would happen if you used there online service. Good think I spoofed them all to be fake.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein