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Amazon To Block Phorm Scans
clickclickdrone writes "The BBC are reporting that Amazon has said it will not allow online advertising system Phorm to scan its web pages to produce targeted ads. For most people this is a welcome step, especially after the European Commission said it was starting legal action against the UK earlier this week over its data protection laws in relation to Phorm's technology. Anyone who values their privacy should applaud this move by Amazon."
I suspect we'll see a fair bit more of this. Not because the world is full of fuzzy defenders of privacy(it isn't); but because the world is full of nonfuzzy violators of privacy and Phorm is trying to muscle in on their action.
One of Amazon's major selling points, beyond their good logistics, is their ability to use site analytics to make interest based recommendations to customers. Obviously, they have zero interest in letting Phorm piggyback on that, on their own site no less.
I suspect that many other major web presences will be in a similar place. Phorm is potentially lucrative for the ISPs, but it is a nontrivial threat to larger site and ad-network operators. The small guys are more or less resigned to outsourcing analytics and ad placement, so it won't be as much of a change for them; but the big independents will not be pleased.
In a statement, Phorm said: "There is a process in place to allow publishers to contact Phorm and opt out of the system, but we do not comment on individual cases."
This would seem to imply that unless you opt out you are in.
Phorm claims to look at robots.txt, but it's unclear what exactly they mean. See http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/webwise/help.html#how-do-i-prevent-webwise-from-scanning-my-site
I think you have to email them.
http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/webwise/help.html#how-do-i-prevent-webwise-from-scanning-my-site
I've emailed them for my domains (they're very small and insignificant).
Except with Google ads, the people who actually own the website choose whether or not to serve them. Phorm ads are injected at the ISP level, completely ignoring whether the server wants the ads or not. Yes, they're still interest based, but they're evil for other reasons in my opinion.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
To write to your UK and EU parliamentary representatives, go to http://www.writetothem.com/
Also, as part of the BT trials, they replaced adverts (from a number of charities) on webpages with their own adverts.
Those sites/advertisers weren't given the chance to opt-out.
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Reading carefully, they'll obey any robot.txt rule for "*", googlebot, or (yahoo) slurp. They apparently didn't feel it necessary to have their own robots.txt identifier so you can block just them.
If they have a top level certificate, they can generate all the domain certs they want on the fly - it would be no different at all to the cert you get from Verisign to run on your web server.
This is why ISPs should never be allowed to own a top level cert.