Do it dynamically
There are 2 main ways to opt out of Phorm:
- Email them, as described above, and hope that they honour your request.
- Use a robots.txt to exclude them, and hope that they honour that request.
Their suggested method to block via robots.txt will also block all other search engines, but you can implement a simple system to just block Phorm if you have dynamic scripting such as PHP available to you. See http://phormcheck.co.uk/website-tools/#robots for an example method.
Of course, if you do request opt-out via email then you're being supportive of their use of opt-out rather than opt-in. Using robots.txt is less so, but still not ideal.
But in a country whose government refuses to defend you against the privacy pirates, you've got to do whatever you can to protect yourself.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
