said by factchecker :

Phorm uses an algorithm that scans webpages as they are loaded and finds "key words" and uses them to customize the ads for the user. The Register had a good summary of how Phorm works a few days ago...

»www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/07···rtegrul/

said by TKJunkMail :

Would it? They would still have the URL you went to whether it was HTTP or HTTPS. So if you went to HTTPS://IhaveCancer.org they would still have that info to sell.

said by »www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/07···rtegrul/ :

Explain for our readers how Phorm's profiling system works.

Marc Burgess: What the profiler does is it first cleans the data. It's looking at two sets of information: the information in the request that's sent to the website and then information in the page that comes back.

From the request it pulls out the URL, and if that URL is a well known search engine such as Google or Yahoo! it'll also look for the search terms that are in the request.

And then from the information returned by the website, the profiler looks at the content. The first thing it does is it ignores several classes of information that could potentially be sensitive. So there's no form fields, no numbers, no email addresses (that is something containing an "@") and anything containing a title like Mr or Mrs.

said by jjoshua :

Web can use https by default. Performance may be slower but that's a tradeoff that some sites may be willing to take.

That would solve the problem.