A good crowd in for this month's talk by Jason of UK Free Software Network, an ISP who help fund free software projects. He was talking about Phorm, a company who provide targeted on-line advertising by using equipment at an ISP to monitor your web browsing. Everyone in advertising wants to gets the 'right' ads to people, but this is going a step too far by intercepting data they have no right to see, ethically and legally. They say that they anonymise the data, but that doesn't make it right. There are some reports that they have been up to some dirty tricks, such as replacing other peoples' ads and using cookies under other names. I've not read much on this myself, but there is plenty of information out there. It was interesting to get the perspective of someone in the industry who wants to protect his customers. He's trying to make a living, but not at the expense of selling out his customers.
My ISP, Virgin, are one of those trialling Phorm. I've not seen anything from them on it. There is supposed to be an opt-out, but can we trust them?
A lot of us already sacrifice some privacy to get some benefit. I have a few loyalty cards that get me some payback in exchange for giving away my shopping details, but it could be tracked to some extent anyway. Sites like Gmail and Facebook target ads based on your communications and habits, but you accept that when you sign up. You mean you didn't read all the terms and conditions? Phorm is different because they look at everything. There are technical options, such as working via a proxy, but these are not available to everyone. With the government wanting to track our on-line habits too, to prevent terrorism (allegedly), using encryption may just draw attention to you and cause you more grief. If too many people do it, then would they ban it? It's happened before in some European countries. France had restrictions on encryption for years. I would like to see more people using encryption for everyday communication. We could do with easy ways to encrypt traffic to mail servers, so that the spooks cannot even see who we communicate with. If anyone wants to do some keysigning I'm always interested. I did some a couple of years back, but not much recently. My key details are here.
We need to fight to protect our right to privacy or the terrorists will have won.
