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."

Comments

Re:How do I opt my website out?

[ebcdic]

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

Re:How do I opt my website out?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Phraudsters

[Blue Stone]

Phorm are liars when it comes to robots.txt.

They say they respect robots.txt but their scraper will only respect it if it also blocks google and yahoo. If it allows Google and Yahoo, they say it's fair game for Phorm. That's not respecting it at all.

But what do you expect from the sort of people who would conduct illegal surveillance on people to test their spyware system and claim that letting opt opt out would have been impossible because it would have been too difficult for them to understand the complicated computery stuff they were doing.

Phraudsters.