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A Setback for ISP Web Tracking

Posted by Soulskill on from the so-sorry-about-your-luck dept.

angelheaded tips a Wired story about the resignation of Bob Dykes, CEO of net eavesdropping firm NebuAd. NebuAd has encountered financial troubles lately as the privacy controversy surrounding the company's tracking methods has driven communications companies away. Over in the UK, Phorm responded to the NebuAd news by affirming that it is making progress with its advertising methods. From The Register: "In response to the outcry over our revealing its two secret trials, BT said in April it would re-engineer the planned deployment so traffic to and from customers who do not want their web use profiled for marketing purposes would not come into contact with the Phorm system. The original blueprint meant that a opt-out cookie would tell the technology to simply ignore refuseniks' browsing as it passed through. It's thought the change has proved tricky. Phorm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the alleged technical problems, but [BT's chief press officer Adam Liversage] said: 'We have been working on some things with Phorm.'"

9 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Why not? by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why not just go to the big pipe guys and ask if they could sniff connections inbound and outbound on arbitrary nodes?

    Doing a sniffed bridged router is a piece of cake and it allows sniffing of all unencrypted content.

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    1. Re:Why not? by sitarah · · Score: 3, Informative

      There's a very large US company called Hitwise that does exactly that. They watch traffic that comes through ISPs and report on traffic, search terms, and competitor activity. It's all at an aggregate level, so there's no identifying information, and they use %-s of traffic rather than hard numbers, so that's why the ISPs don't view it as a privacy issue. Last I heard, they are audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers to make sure they're anonymizing correctly. The only difference between them and NebuAd is that they don't create ads, just sell information.

      It is the same service as Comscore and Compete provide, but without a 'panel'. The reason is that these panels (~1 mil people) know they're being watched and in fact signed up for it. In addition, Comscore can only extrapolate their behavior to the millions of internet users. With Hitwise, you on your ISP have no idea anyone is watching, so it is not biased, and there's a sample size of millions.

  2. They have been discussing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    who is going to prison for tapping 18,000 people
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/05/bt_phorm_police_meeting/

    this is not including the private actions they will be facing for copyright infrigement, insider trading, fraud

    1. Re:They have been discussing by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No one is going to prison. The British are even more used to overt, and covert, silence in every aspect of their lives than the USA. Look at the NSA tapping of the core routers of UUnet, and the lack of any prosecutions for blatantly illegal government activity.

      As long as they cooperate with law enforcement monitoring desires, I'm afraid there's not going to be any prosecution of any sort.

  3. Good but not enough by schwaang · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This needs to be so clearly illegal that no American ISP would have thought about trying it to begin with.

  4. Re:Why... by Darkness404 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If they are really good at what they do, they will have a loyal fanbase that will support them via merchandise or donations. Just look at Homestar Runner, TBC makes a profit solely by merchandise sales.

    Not to mention that a lot of sites that have ads (I'm looking at you cable news stations) already have a steady revenue of money from somewhere.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  5. Re:Why... by Adambomb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, I think thats more of a problem of scale. The larger user base you have, the less consumers think of contributing in the name of good will as "ahh they're doing alright" (and in some cases, that'd be valid to say).

    I'm not saying that such a business model would not be profitable, i'm just saying most businesses see it as a diminishing returns kind of model. It will get them to a certain point of profitability but then probably stay there, which is not the kind of thing shareholders want to hear. For someone making a living while producing what they like, this is great. Hell, you could even run a nice private business that way and people would love it so long as you juggled properly. When the words "publicly traded" get into the picture though...well...you wont be hearing the words "eh, we're comfortable with this level of profit. Lets stick with this".

    Of course this is not an excuse; It's simply a reason, but I do think it is why we do not see this kind of model being used in more large scale groups.

    --
    Ice Cream has no bones.
  6. Technical analysis by labcake · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you are interested in what phorm /webwise actually does here is a technical paper: Richard Claytons technical paper: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/080518-phorm.pdf

  7. Re:A cookie? by sakdoctor · · Score: 3, Informative

    Exactly. Am I supposed to white list every scumbag company that provides an "opt-out" cookie. That just doesn't make sense because the supply of scumbag companies is practically unlimited.

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c4/Phorm_cookie_diagram.png
    Just look at all the spoofing nonsense. That just adds points of failure.

    If you haven't switched away from your phorm infested ISP by now, then be sure to add both *phorm* AND *webwise.net* to your ad blocker.
    Remember, friends don't let friends use (AOL|talktalk|virgin.net|BT)