No problem with ads...
they're the only thing funding many of my favourite sites. The problem with phorm is more fundamental, it's to do with architecture and peoples general expectation that the only people who 'see' your surfing activity are people you ASK to, i.e. the people serving the pages you go to and, if both you and they do advertising, their advertisers.
That I DON'T have a problem with. If you don't like a sites advertisers you still have a number of choices: don't go there, disable 3rd party cookies, install ad-blockers whatever, it's YOUR choice and the market will vote with its feet.
How is a market supposed to function well when everybody is tied into 12 month contracts whos terms can change without your agreement at pretty much any point.
Your ISP will already co-operate with the police if a judge agrees there's reasonable suspicion of a crime being commited. Now in order to more effectively flog viagra and insurance we are creating a single point where dozens of ISPs send all their users surfing history in real time, creating a dangerous resource, one that only the most hopelessly naive would suggest won't be abused at some point in the future - as the police database routinely is.
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
Christ, 1984 really ought to be part of the national curriculum!
Roger Heathcote (using https whenever possible from now onwards!)