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Wikipedia Opts Out Of Phorm

Posted by timothy on from the phorm-of-their-objection dept.

ais523 writes "Wikipedia (and other websites run by Wikimedia) have requested to opt-out from Phorm; according to the email they sent, they 'consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors' behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their privacy.'" Another reader points to this post on techblog.wikimedia.org which includes a confirmation from Phorm that those sites will be excluded.

2 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. May be copyvio too by Xtifr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any content that is distributed under any of the Creative Commons NC licenses (e.g. cc-sa-nc cannot legally used for advertising purposes. The very similar license under which the Grateful Dead allow redistribution of their old concert recordings explicitly lists advertising and "exploiting databases compiled from their traffic" as forbidden.

  2. Re:The official post by OldakQuill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The BBC can't opt-out at the moment. It seems that major sites which do opt-out at the moment make news (including headlines at http://news.bbc.co.uk/). It'd be quite reflexive for the BBC to opt-out from a scheme run by a major UK telecommunications company and to report it on their news website, since that is a major source of their web traffic. The BBC News website itself would be making the news by undermining BT's scheme on the grounds of privacy invasion. When enough sites have opted-out for it to be non-news, they could do it.

    Also, the BBC and BT have to work with each other on things like iPlayer, the online television/radio delivery platform. Perhaps the BBC are avoiding opting-out on these grounds too.

    Then again, since the BBC has a special place in the UK regarding license fee and lack of advertising, perhaps they were opted-out of the scheme from the beginning.