Have You Called an Internet Advertising Phoul on Phorm?

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:28:18 +0000

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I don’t mind advertisers, so long as they are advertising something I would care about. I notice Marketing campaigns all the time. Overall, they don’t annoy me. I know people treat advertising differently than they treat other things in life. It’s a necessary evil. People are usually happy when they get a good deal. That’s why I have been actively posting coupons for awhile now, and have even set up a Coupon Search Engine for all of you to use.

Some people don’t like advertising at all, due to the way it’s being done. SupaFly wrote to me the other day to talk to me about Phorm. According to him, the three main ISPs in England have partnered with Phorm. Phorm is a type of advertiser that looks at what you are doing online, and will then send you targeted ads. There has been a lot of public outcry about this, surrounding privacy concerns.

I don’t know if this is necessarily invading privacy, any more than Gmail’s advertising is. It’s likely a benign form of watching patterns, and not targeting you specifically. Think of it as targeting your generic behaviors. I don’t agree that this is really the way to go. If the website you’re visiting isn’t selling or showing ads… then there shouldn’t be any embedded into it by a third party.

It’s a fine line when you’re talking about advertisements, specifically related to the Internet. If the ISP itself is doing this… I don’t think that’s quite right. All the ISP should be doing is providing you access to Websites, who could choose or not to provide ads. If people are paying to access the Internet, and ads are getting served against them and their privacy is being invaded… it’s just not cool.

I really wanted to throw this out to everyone in England who has to deal with this. Give me your thoughts… give me the skinny and the 411. How do you feel about this? Now that Phorm has been around for awhile, do you just deal with it or are you still fighting against it?

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Have You Called an Internet Advertising Phoul on Phorm?

Chris Pirillo » phorm

Have You Called an Internet Advertising Phoul on Phorm?