Phorm answers back to negative press
Monday 10 March 2008
Since it was revealed that
BT,
Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse were officially teaming up with the targeted advertising software company, Phorm, the service has been the subject of controversy.
According to The Register, the advertising targeting firm has taken part in a video webcast in order to clear up public concern. Although the live webcast wasn't archived, The Register has posted a transcript of its own interview.
Featuring in the live video webcast, Phorm's CEO Kent Ertegrul and employee, Mark Burgess spoke of the development of Phorm and describe in detail how profiling system works:
"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."
A full version of the interview transcript can be viewed
here.
Source:
The Register
