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Amazon To Block Phorm Scans

Posted by Soulskill on from the take-this-dpi-and-shove-it dept.

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."

1 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How do I opt my website out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Kind of useless really. Crawlers using robots.txt are supposed to uniquely identify themselves, so that you may block specific crawlers. Phorm doesn't do this - instead, it processes directives intended for Google, Yahoo, and all crawlers.

    Effectively, the only way to block Phorm with robots.txt would also block all search engines. That makes it effectively impossible to do, while still allowing them to claim that it can be done.

    Bastards.

    Anyway, if there were a way to block just Phorm using robots.txt, you can bet that as soon as a couple of major sites start doing it, Phorm will start ignoring it.