how-to block ads
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en102
Canadian, eh?
join:2001-01-26
Valencia, CA | Who watches the watchers ? Since this company works in the background, and has full access to sniff and resell your traffic, who is going to ensure that these companies operate legit ?
Absolute power corrupts... absolutely.
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Canada = Hollywood North | |
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Karl Bode
News Guy
join:2000-03-02 | Re: Who watches the watchers ? Yeah I really see no transparency here with either NebuAD or this UK outfit. I'm not sure who exactly will be confirming claims of privacy protection in an age where everybody wants their regulators blindfolded and toothless. | |
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amigo_boy
join:2005-07-22
Tempe, AZ
 ·Cox HSI
 ·magicjack.com
2 edits | Re: Who watches the watchers ? said by Karl Bode  :Yeah I really see no transparency here with either NebuAD or this UK outfit. I'm not sure who exactly will be confirming claims of privacy protection in an age where everybody wants their regulators blindfolded and toothless. To me this relates back to so-called wiretapping and amnesty. The government's not allowed to maintain a database of personal information about individuals. So, an industry has developed (Lexus Nexus, et. al.) to do it, and the government is their largest customer. Without it being governed by law, they lose data all the time, selling it to imposter businesses, etc.
I suspect that will be the same thing that happens as the government has a need to examine network "demographic" information using raw data they are prohibited from collecting. Industries like the one under discussion will pop up as long as there's money in it (serving the government as the largest customer).
Mark | |
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No to Phorm
@co.uk
| Phorm is NOT a UK outfit, it is registered in Delaware; the director is a Russian crook responsible for the 121 spyware rootkits, and the laughable so-called opt out will be processed on servers in China. The ISP will send every page you retrieve to them (content not just URL) including for example the text of any webmail you use or your facebook pages etc. | |
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swhx7
Premium
join:2006-07-23
Elbonia
·RoadRunner Cable
| said by »www.phorm.com/user_privacy/no_pe···info.php : Phorm technology doesn't gather personally-identifiable information. It does not view any information on secure (HTTPS) pages, and ignores strings of numbers longer than three digits to ensure that it does not collect credit card numbers, phone numbers, National Insurance numbers or other potentially private information. It doesn't store IP addresses or retain browsing or search histories. In other words, they have the capability to easily capture all the data they claim it doesn't, but merely promise not to capture more than they say.
At this point, the invasion of privacy has already occurred. The claim that the 3rd party won't do any harm when it monitors all the customer's traffic does not redeem the original violation, when the ISP makes all the data (including "personally identifiable" data) available to a marketing company.
said by »www.phorm.com/user_privacy/no_pe···info.php :At first, Phorm's technology collects information on browser type, response to advertising, the URLs of some of the web pages viewed, and search terms entered. Neither URLs nor search terms are stored - they are discarded immediately. The matching information that's left is assigned to an anonymous, randomly-generated ID number. The random ID marks an anonymous list of the categories of products or services in which a user appears to be interested. This "ID number" may be all that's shown to advertisers, but the device at the ISP must necessarily match it with the ISP customer's IP address; there's no other way it could deliver ads selectively.
Websense/Phorm/OIX claims it's audited by a big accounting firm to verify it complies with its own claims about how limited its data-mining supposedly is. Never mind the conflict of interest in that it's Websense/Phorm/OIX itself paying for these audits. They'll wait until customers get used to it, then sooner or later there will be a notice from the ISP saying "Our clickstream maketing company has changed, please read the new Terms of Service" or "Websense/Phorm/OIX has changed its terms of service" or similar, and then they'll be data-mining everything, and you still won't have any competitor with better terms to go to.
It's going to take legislation to force ISPs to offer "pure" internet access. We need either a prohibition of the customer-exploitation schemes, if ISPs are to remain oligoipolies; or internet-access markets being forced open to competition so abundant that eventually fair terms will be available to the end-user.
said by »www.webwise.com/how-it-works/faq.html :How do I switch off Webwise?Simply go to www.Webwise.com and click Webwise Off. If you have several computers using the same internet connection, or use different log-ins or browsers, be sure to switch off Webwise from each one. What happens when I switch off Webwise?When Webwise is off, you will no longer receive warnings before reaching suspected fraudulent sites. Webwise will also no longer analyse any data from the web pages that you browse to see if there are better ads to show you. We’ll assign a new anonymous cookie on your computer to tell our system to ignore that computer. You will still receive ads in the normal course of visiting a website. So apparently the opt-out is based on a cookie. But a browser will send cookie data back only to the domain that set the cookie. This implies that the scheme works in the following way. Ad agencies sign up for Websense/Phorm/OIX service and have their ads placed through one of those domains; something in the ad scripts checks with Websense/Phorm/OIX. If the web surfer is on an infected (collaborating) ISP, Websense/Phorm/OIX will select an ad for the page based on the user's categories; otherwise the regular ad gets placed.
The following implies the above is correct. Apparently it depends on accessing certain domains:
said by »www.webwise.com/how-it-works/faq.html :I delete my cookies regularly, and I want to keep Webwise switched off. How do I do that?If you regularly delete your cookies and want to ensure that Webwise is permanently switched off, simply add [OIX.net] to the Blocked Cookies settings in your browser. Better yet, make sure nothing gets past your firewall to or from any variation of websense.com, phorm.com or oix.net, or any other domains these companies use. | |
| | patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY
1 edit | Re: Who watches the watchers ? There is no way in hell you will stop your packets from going through their servers. This is probably implemented as a transparent HTTP proxy that you CAN NOT disable, otherwise why would you need the cookie? They could just have a list of the customers/IPs that opt-ed out, couldn't they?
Time to colocated a server in a datacenter and VPN to it for privacy.
Edit: Your right this will get silently sneaked into TOS/AUPs eventually, and you won't be able to opt-out. If you don't agree, cancel your broadband account. T1s don't gave clickstream monitoring right (only because govt won't let a Baby Bell interfere with a T1, but one of these days T1s are going to be deregulated and then baby bells will be able to collect clickstream data, since instead of the govt's TOS/AUP, your now following the baby bell's TOS/AUP). | |
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