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- > Phorm Comms' response to the comments of Tim Berners Lee
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Phorm Comms' response to the comments of Tim Berners Lee 20 March 2008 12:13
Phorm believes that it is wrong to store Internet users' personal
data.
Our technology is a real turning point in the protection of privacy
online - it does not store personally identifiable information, does
not store IP addresses and nor does it store browsing histories. By
contrast, ad targeting from other major Internet companies means that
potentially identifiable personal data is stored for over 12 months
before it is even anonymised. Also, because these companies reach
nearly all UK Internet users, consumers effectively have no real
choice about being targeted in this way. With the Phorm technology,
users can choose - they can opt out or in at any time.
Sir Tim Berners Lee is not familiar with the Phorm system, so he did
not know that his example is impossible with our system (in the BBC
story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7299875.stm). There is
no match to ‘sensitive’ areas such as medical conditions, no record
of what sites users have visited, and no data of any kind is passed
by the system to a third party (in his example to insurers).
We look forward to speaking to Tim Berners Lee to explain how our
technology is a ground breaking advance in delivering targeted ads
while protecting privacy online and consumer choice, as we have with
other experts.
You can ask questions about the system and get loads more information
by visiting http://blog.webwise.com or www.webwise.com
<http://www.webwise.com> or www.phorm.com <http://www.phorm.com>