Why BT might have finished off Phorm

Monday, July 6th, 2009

For months we’ve been wondering who would be the first ISP to take the plunge with Phorm’s technology: now BT’s decision has helped push Phorm off the edge of the cliff.

Make no mistake: BT’s decision to drop Phorm is a cataclysmic blow for the advertising firm (as reflected by the sharp drop in its share price this morning). In one stroke, it’s lost the UK’s single biggest ISP and its closest ally.

Phorm’s three UK ISP partners – BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk – have been playing a cowardly game of chicken over the past 18 months. The service has attracted so much negative publicity that all three have sat on the fence, hoping that one of the others would be brave enough to roll out the service, so they could judge just how much of a PR disaster it would be.

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Is BT losing its bottle on Phorm?

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Is BT really committed to an unholy matrimony with behavioural advertising service Phorm? Or is the country’s biggest broadband provider beginning to lose its nerve?

Last week BT turned down an invitation to defend Phorm and its like at the House of Commons, using the excuse that it was “too close” to the technology. Presumably, BT will be gracefully bowing out every time broadband is discussed at Government level in the future… 

Today, when asked to comment on Phorm’s claim that making the service opt-out would be enough to pacify the data watchdogs, BT could hardly be less committal. Just look at the obsfucation, in the following, verbatim comment from a BT spokesman.

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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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BT’s Phorm trial – the worst excuse ever

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Why didn’t BT tell the Information Commissioner about its Phorm trial in 2006? Because it was worried about the privacy implications? No, because it was a bit techy, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

“BT did not discuss these trials with the ICO as they were technical in nature,” the ICO claims in a statement sent to PC Pro.

Considering that pretty much every piece of personal data  is now held on a computer database somewhere, is there anything left that isn’t too “technical in nature” for our poor Information Commissioner, which is presumably waiting for Mrs Miggins from the corner shop to lose her paper-round book before clamping down with the full force of our stringent data laws?

Who do you think you’re kidding, Phorm?

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Can you hear that noise in the background? That’s the sound of our friends at controversial web-advertising firm, Phorm, scraping the barrel.

Having previously hailed Phorm as the solution to all our phishing nightmares, the company is now claiming it’s the answer to Britain’s rural broadband divide.

Phorm claims that a new survey showing London has broadband speeds that are twice as fast as regions such as Northern Ireland proves that “the model for funding the internet is broken.”

The answer? Allow ISPs to benefit from Phorm’s advertising revenue, of course. “Billions are needed for higher-speed networks yet currently ISPs only have income from broadband subscriptions,” Phorm’s CEO Kent Ertugrul claims.

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