Phorm Phudged

Three of the UK’s biggest internet service providers – Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk – allegedly sell your private web browsing history to an advertising broker using a system called Phorm. The contents of every web page you visit, apparently, gets harvested by Phorm in realtime as you click, and this is used to create a personal profile, which can then be used to send you ‘targeted advertising’. Bad phorm indeed and the equivalent of NebuAd on ISPs elsewhere.

I don’t like the idea that your ISP has some kind of built in system to track all your web browsing and is assimilating a profile of you on that basis and then using that to target you with ads and redirect you to pages you otherwise wouldn’t see.

Now, you could probably get around this problem by using HotSpot Shield, as it creates an encrypted virtual private network connection between you and the internet (great for surfing privately on public wifi systems). However, Hotspot will effectively slow down your connection to some degree and running it means certain email and FTP clients will not work their 100% best. An alternative that works within your browser would be much better.

So, thanks once again to ghacks for alerting us to Firephorm a Phorm-burning Firefox extension (obviously doesn’t work with Google Chrome).

Ghacks’ Martin explains that Firephorm allows you to send broken cookies to the Phorm tracking system, so rendering its analysis useless. “Firephorm provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user,” Martin explains.