Phorm boss: Opt-in is a "red herring"

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 16 Apr 2008 at 12:48

The issue of whether Phorm should be "opt-in" has been described by the advertising platform's chief executive as a "huge red herring".

Phorm executives met with journalists and privacy advocates last night to discuss its advertising platform, with the aim of convincing the gathered sceptics that it would be "a privacy revolution."

Among the heated exchanges Kent Ertugrul, Phorm's chief executive, responded to the Information Commissioner's Office finding that it would need to be "opt-in" to be legal, by arguing the debate was blurring the real issue.

"When you come online there will be a page saying [WebWise] is on, this is what it does and you can click and you can see a privacy video and you'll have a choice. It's not really about opt-in and opt-out, that's a red herring. It's about, do you know it is on and do you know what you're buying into."

"When people go to a search engine, and they search for something, how many know that everything they search for, every keyword no matter how sensitive is stored against their IP address which is personally identifiable. How many of them know there's something they might want to opt out of? What you need is notice, clear English speaking notice - "this is on, do you want it?"

Ertugrul went on to argue that Phorm represented a crucial revenue source for ISPs, and was a necessary service should customers continue to demand broadband at the price they are paying.

"When people talk about advertising on search engines, you hear 'if I go to Google, well that provides a service' - well what about the guys that are connecting you to the internet, isn't that a service? How do you get to Google in the first place? Consumers have proved that they don't want to pay any more to connect to the internet. In the UK the business of connecting you to the internet is almost not worth doing, the margins are so razor thin."

However, the idea that Phorm could one day become crucial to the infrastructure of the internet was dismissed by Dr Richard Clayton, treasurer of the Foundation for Information Policy Research and a professor at Cambridge University: "I've been involved with ISPs for a lot of years and seen a lot of advertising companies come and go, and I don't think this one will be any different - it's just a bit more obnoxious than the others."