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Rights Groups Speak Out Against Phorm, UK Comm. Database
MJackson writes "The Open Rights Group (ORG) has issued a public letter to the Chief Privacy Officers (or the nearest equivalent) for seven of the world's largest website giants (including Microsoft and Google), asking them to boycott Phorm. The controversial Phorm system works with broadband ISPs to monitor what websites you visit for use in targeted advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has issued a new report slamming the UK government's plans for a Communications Database. This would be designed to intercept and log every UK ISP user's e-mail headers, website accesses and telephone history. The report warns that the public are often, 'neither served nor protected by the increasingly complex and intrusive holdings of personal information invading every aspect of our lives.'"
If, for instance, your mommy says you are special; but nobody else does, your specialness isn't "controversial" in any useful sense, it's just a settled matter with a contrarian outlier. In this case, the only people who think Phorm is even remotely a good idea are A)Phorm and B)ISPs who Phorm has promised gobs of money. That isn't "controversy", it is a handful of money-grubbing special interests attempting to screw everybody else. To dignify Phorm as "controversial" is far more than it deserves.
It's seems the UK government is constantly trying to do some and more to stop it's citizens having any kind of privacy.
While it's great that people like the ORG and JRRT are standing up to them and other organisations doing the same, you have to wonder, what can they really do when half the population is too ignorant to care?
This isn't popular to point out but you set the stage for this when you let your Government disarm the population "for your protection". And no, I'm not implying that guns keep the Government in line. I'm implying that by acquiescing to the surrender of a right you held for hundreds of years you set the stage for the Government to curtail your other rights. If the populace didn't squeal when we took away the guns why should we assume they'll squeal when we take away the privacy? It's for their protection after all.
If you don't see the connection between the two then shame on you.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If you don't like what your ISP is planning to do then change it. Personally I will be trying this:- http://superawesomebroadband.com/ Does anyone have any experiance with them?
They fitted George Orwell's coffin with rollers so he could turn over more easily years ago.
Drawing parallels between a commercial targeted advertising tracking system and a government communications database seems harmful to me. Commercial advertising databases like Phorm often do not store and do not care about personal details: they're after demographics. They just want to know what you like and what you don't. Where you live or what your e-mail address isn't very important because they intend to use this information for things like banner ads or text ads or whatever.
Putting a link on the screen for a limited edition boxed set of a movie when you've been reading reviews of it is far more valuable than sending spam, either e-mail spam or the postal 'junk mail' variety, because you're actually likely to follow the link.
You're just an anonymous statistic to Phorm. To a UK Communications Database, you are an individual and they are tracking personally-identifiable information.
Big difference and drawing these parallels, I think, does more harm than good to the cause of privacy advocates.
The UK and France are slowly but surely turning into the totalitarian states that, prior to 1990, they despised. You can't carry a defensive weapon to protect yourself from a criminal attack. You can't walk down the street without a camera following you. You can't visit websites with nudity or other "harmful" material (censorship of the right to expression). You don't have a right to a trial by your peers (three strikes and you lose ISP access). Your biometric data is being recorded and tracked by the government, and soon I wouldn't be surprised if they make diets mandatory for people with BMI>25 (as has happened in Japan), or else get fined.
Yay. Freedom won. (cough). Or maybe not.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
alright sir just bend over while we implant this device in your ass. Don't worry it will only hurt for a minute. It will also monitor your flatulence and automatically withdraw money from your bank account to cover the cost of emitting greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. We told you to keep your gas sequestered now look what you made us do.
Links to the Rowntree report: executive summary, and the full report. (Both in PDF format). It's worth mentioning that their report doesn't particularly single out the communications database. They assessed 46 databases across all the major UK government departments. They found that at least one quarter "are almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law", and that these "should be scrapped or substantially redesigned", while over "half have significant problems with privacy or effectiveness and could fall foul of a legal challenge". Less than 15% were believed to be "effective, proportionate and necessary". They had some equally damning things to say about the cost of IT projects in the public sector, and the high failure rate of the projects (only 30% succeed).
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I highly doubt that some of the largest website giants are going to provide active discourse to boycott all of this invasion of privacy of traffic logging and email snooping. Look at how these large internet conglomerates get their money: from ads specifically tracking where you click your mouse on their website.
But anyway. Gee, look at the time! 1984 all ready.
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. - Nietzche
Let me get back to you when my sides stop hurting from laughing.
Firefox plus any number of anti-advert plugins stop most adverts, so the system would be self-defeating to what is an ever larger percentage of people dumping browsers like Internet Explorer.
Don't expect the UK's privacy head to do anything, he makes a lot of noises like over the adding of 1 million innocent people to the DNA database (which is the largest in the world and larger than all 26 other European countries combined), but has let the government carry on. Deliberately toothless, a good PR job is all he does.
What is more worrying though, is that this technology has the ability to re-write web pages on the fly per users requests. So today it's just adverts being changed, tomorrow it's whole content and history changed to suit a governments propaganda. It must be made MUCH easier and cheaper for any website no matter how small to be able to use HTTPS instead of standard HTTP. This will help to put one over the evil that is Phorm and the governments and media who want to control content.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I found this comment in TFA (I believe it's taken from the Roundtree Report) intriguing:
"One of them (the National DNA Database) has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, and both the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats have promised to scrap many of the others (emphasis mine)."
Is the an instance of the Tories saying simply "we're not Labour," or is this some new-found attachment to civil liberties by a party previously known for devotion to monarchy and deference to authority?
The Conservatives have never been very fond of Brussels either, so I'm guessing it's not a new-found devotion to the concept of EU-wide human rights that trump the authority of the member national governments.
Whenever I see a story about internet and privacy, the same thought comes to mind.
The idea is brought up regularly on slash. Are we at the point that we need a type of DNS/ssl system put in place?
I mean, come on!, this IS slashdot people here??
Meh..GET OFF MY LAWN!!
Seriously, we are the ones to blame. We dragged our feet over encryption. We made encryption the arcane, complex, unusable and, worst of all, optional privacy measure that it is today. We still develop new protocols and file formats without tamper-proofing them.
IPv6, for all that it could be, will not require end to end encryption. It will have a mandatory option which is so complicated that it will never be used.
DNS, which is abused by most government censorship efforts, has been mended several times to avoid cryptographic signatures on DNS data.
Sites like slashdot.org, geek havens, are still not available via HTTPS. How do we expect others to protect privacy when we can't even do it for ourselves? Who here reads and writes signed (or even signed and encrypted) mail?
... add google-analytics.com to your AdBlock Plus filter, and presto! Fast again.
This, shows up in my news feeds, on the same day that the Tories declare that they are considering repealing the Human Rights Act if they come to power...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm confused as to why you only emphasized that part of the statement... The Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats simply tend to be on opposing sides of any debate. It seems to me that the quote was merely intended to imply that politicians from the entire spectrum of parties agree on this, and that's unique!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/24/police_ad/
While repealing the human rights act sounds horrific, I can support it as long as its replaced with something better.
The Human rights act has been used by criminals to sue people for injuries they incurred trying to rob them and is heavily abused by rejected asulym seekers to delay their removal, the whole school girl demanding to wearing speacial clothing in school and by much of the PC brigade to supress the majority. Having actually read it I think it would be a lot easier to tear the thing up and start out using the old act as a guide rather than try and patch the issues in the current one.