Lib Dems were wrong to gag Phorm

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

It’s not often I find myself defending Phorm, but at the House of Commons today the behavioural advertising service was genuinely hard done by.

Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Miller invited a hand-picked panel of internet experts and politicians to a roundtable discussion entitled: The Internet Threat: Who needs privacy when we can have relevant ads?  A title that makes its stance on behavioural advertising pretty damned clear. And there were only two companies mentioned in the press release: BT and Phorm.

She further loaded the dice by picking a selection of renowned Phorm critics including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who’s spoken out against Phorm and its like in the past; Dr Richard Clayton and  Nicholas Bohm from the Foundation for Information Policy Research, the organisation that branded BT’s secret Phorm trials “illegal”; and Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group.

Nothing wrong with that, and the credentials of the panel are beyond dispute. But for some reason, Baroness Miller wasn’t prepared to give Phorm a seat at the table, relegating its CEO Kent Ertugrul and various flunkies to the back of the room with us journalists. BT were invited to speak, but declined.

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