My analysis
The following entirely my own opinion, as an Information Technology professional:
'When you actually poll people and you say to them "what are the things that irritate you most about the internet?" they'll say two things: being bombarded with the amount of irrelevant advertising, and online dangers.'
Bollocks. The sheer amount of advertising, not relevance of the advertising, is the issue. I don't need a spyware purveyor to be my nanny, thanks, I can choose which Web sites to visit and which to ignore. Anything with more than three thigns I recognize as "advertising" go on my ignore list. I'm usre other people have higher (and lower) thresholds.
"I think that most sites in due course will show less advertising."
How long is "in due course?" A year? A decade? A century? Duping people into understanding what you *want* them to take away from your statements, without telling outright lies, is a fine art, and it looks like Phorm is very good at that.
'Because our privacy is better. It has got an on/off switch. There's a place consumers can go and say "off". They can't do that right now.'
This one, however, is an outright lie. The hosts file is readily available to every Internet user, and by adding Phorm's DNS hijacker to the hosts file published by MVPS.org, every Internet user can permanently opt-out of Phorm's spying.
'Look, if we had anything to hide we wouldn't invite you in here. We'd give you some bullshit statement saying "no comment"'
No, you'd use the old standby of misdirection. I've been a stage magician; I know how it's done.
"here are options in Firefox and IE that do that already.
KE: I know, but how many people do you think actually use that?"
Millions, apparently.
"This is a way of helping people who aren't necessarily tech-savvy."
From a tech-savvy point of view, this is a way of collecting data to which Phorm has no legal right from people who don't know they're giving it up.
"If people come away from this interview thinking we're these slimy people, then we can't make an impact."
No impact, then.
And here's why I think they're slimy:
"It'll be automatically switched on then?
KE: The conversation over opt-in/opt-out is blurred by the one about transparency. They want to always be aware about whether something is on or off.
So we're going to do something unprecedented, and you'll never see this anywhere. Which is, as they continue to browse periodically you're going to see in an ad space "Webwise is on" or "Webwise is off","
So they *are* going to detect the cookie, and they *are* going to react to it, *EVEN* *IF* *THE* *USER* *HAS* *OPTED* *OUT*. And frankly, that alone tells me that Phorm cannot be trusted to not collect the data, and cannot be trusted to install their server without a back door into it. Honestly, anyone who's ever had a server in a remote data center knows that only an idiot would put it there if there was no way to access it remotely.
In summary, I trust these guys about as far as I can throw Scotland.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
