Ciaran McNulty

I just got the following email:

"Thank you for your submission to the Phorm website exclusion list. If there are no obvious grounds to doubt the legitimacy of the request the URL will be blocked as soon as possible, usually within 48 hours."

You can get one too by writing an email to the Phorm opt-out address (website-exclusion@webwise.com) asking them to remove their service from any and all domains you have control over. I could explain why, but it's best if you just do it first. What you'll be doing is placing a vote against a fairly insidious new marketing system that most of your users won't know how to opt out of, or even know is happening. Go on, do it before you read the next paragraph.

For years marketing companies have been offering consumers the following deal: "Give us a completely history of every website you visit, and in exchange we'll give you slightly more targeted adverts". Most people on hearing this proposition don't really see what's in it for them, and decline. Basically, the price in privacy is worth far less to most people than some idea of amazingly personalised advertising.

It's been tried time and time again - DoubleClick are probably the most successful attempt to push this model, they essentially operate by providing ads to different sites from their one domain, and getting each ad to set a cookie in the user browser so the browsing behaviour across sites can be tracked. This is so unappealing that a whole ecosystem of third-party browser extensions and cookie blockers sprang up. You could interpret that as a comprehensive rejection of the model by 'the industry'.

Phorm is a technology that tries to apply this model again, but at the ISP level. The idea is that someone like BT can run all their user traffic through a logging proxy and then use that data to feed into what ads people see (it's actually more complex than that, but that's the gist of the idea). Unlike Doubleclick, the data on the users preferences therefore comes from all sites they visit, not just ones that are part of the advertising network. This won't be anything users notice, and its legality is being debated in different territories, but here in the UK BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk are already trialling it under the name Webwise.

In theory this is an 'opt in' system for users, but it's being sneaked into the terms of service for these ISPs, as part of the big pack you get when you sign up that nobody ever reads or as one of those 'updates' you sometimes get in the post. They'll also have an 'opt out' form buried somewhere in their support website, but for most users the whole thing will go on without their noticing.

As a website owner, the only way of opting out is to write to the email address I mention above. The Phorm docs say the only way of stopping them using traffic information from visits to your site is to add the following to robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: / 

That's right - their official solution is for you to ban all robots from visiting, so you have to sacrifice your search engine rankings if you want to opt out. Perhaps a more convenient fix would be for Phorm to let us know what their user-agent's name is, but it's of course not in their interest to make it easy.

Phorm is currently being challenged in the courts, but while that's going on I'd urge all website owners to opt out. You'll be doing your users a favour, and you'll be adding your voice to the many who are telling ISPs that this is something we Do Not Want.