Phorm considers paying users

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 08:04

Phorm has admitted it's considering offering users financial incentives to sign up for its behavioural advertising scheme.

Speaking at the company's second "Town Hall" event in London last night, Phorm CEO Kent Ertugrul said offering customers discounted broadband connections or making a donation to charity on their behalf were among the incentives being considered by the company.

Earlier this year, Phorm told PC Pro that it had no need to pay customers to use its service. "Consumer research demonstrates a strong demand from internet users for our current offer which improves their browsing experience by reducing the amount of irrelevant advertising they see and helping protect them from phishing online fraud," the company said in a statement.

Phorm, which has completed a public trial of its Webwise technology with BT, refuses to disclose what percentage of BT's customers signed up for the opt-in service. "We're not in a position to comment on the specifics of the trial," Ertugrul said last night.

However, the Phorm boss insists that BT - which was once again conspicuous by its absence - is fully behind Webwise. "BT has been very forthcoming," Ertugrul claimed. "It's paved the way for the tranformation of the ISPs' business model.

"We're particularly excited about where we can go with this," he added. "I think you'll see our confidence is justified. We're very satisfied with where it [Webwise] is already."

Privacy row

The Phorm boss also used the event to dismiss the continuing privacy fears over Phorm's deep-packet inspection technology. Ertugrul attempted to paint opponents of the system as a lunatic fringe.

"We believe in choice," the Phorm CEO claimed. "Consumers should be given a clear, consistent, transparent choice [about whether they want to use Webwise].

"There are actually some people who believe consumers shouldn't be given a choice," he said in reference to Phorm's opponents. "They've spent the past year trying to turn this into something evil."

"There are relatively few of them. They try and create a circle of noise around Phorm. It's come to the point where people are starting to wonder, why are they doing this?"

Those critics include none other than world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who last month described services such as Webwise as like "allowing them to put a television camera in your room".

Ertugrul remains unfazed by such high-profile criticism. "On privacy, we'll continue to listen, but it's been a long time since anything factual has been brought up that caused us concern," he said.

Check out the current issue of PC Pro for our investigation into whether it's too late to stop Phorm