• BBC News, Friday, March 7, 2008 10:45 AM

There's a new type of adware invading British shores. Phorm, a self-described behavioral targeting/adware company, has passed a privacy sniff test issued by Privacy International and will go live next week. Phorm provides software-based marketing for Internet service providers like British Telecom, Virgin and Talk Talk. It places a cookie on a user's machine that tracks all the sites visited and actions taken as a user surfs the Web. It then interprets the users' behavior in order to target relevant advertising. ISPs and other companies then receive a cut of the revenue.

Phorm also utilizes the ages-old adware trick of providing privacy protection software on top of its user data mining. The company argues that its software not only helps protect consumers from viruses, but it also makes ads more relevant.

This is behavior targeting on the grandest scale. As such, there's been a public outcry over privacy concerns, but Phorm just passed the privacy test issued by respected authority Privacy International. The data the company collects is anonymous, and no user profiles are ever created, no IP addresses are stored, and neither are search queries-although the firm does collect keywords on Web pages. Users can also opt-out.

Read the whole story at BBC News »