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factchecker

@charter.com

reply to GOLFnSUN
Re: HTTPS

said by GOLFnSUN See Profile :

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.
They would see the URL, but that is it.

HTTPS would definitely go a long way toward foiling Phorm. 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...

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.


jap
Premium
join:2003-08-10
038xx
·RoadRunner Cable

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/
Cripes. I never thought of backtracking to scan referring url. Bastards. No way for a client to detect presence of such a server tool either. Maybe some kind Mozilla user - who doesn't work for a data mining company - has created a redirect plugin. Time to locate some form of local referrer washer.

Thanks for the Register link. Evil for server owners to install such a tool.

[reminisces the pre-commercial web days]
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