phorm/webwise

Jocatz

I'm not very savvy about things such as this. Just how much will they be able to see 'over my shoulder' and will they be storing this information about me somewhere?

Who are these Webwise people do they have a good reputation?

I do all my banking over the net, and feel very worried if any of that information is going to be at risk?

markyboy7

My mate sent me this in an e-mail.

http://www.inphormationdesk.org/

It doesn't say anything about the discount though. I think they say they don't look at bank details somewhere, so I think you are safe.

Does anyone know about the discounts?

Helix

I doubt they will be offering discounts. I recon they will sell it as preventing them from putting prices up, what with the increasing amount of bandwidth being used now a days, and how they will be investing it into new services - blah, blah, blah.

If you watch the interview BBC Click did with Phorm then you will see that discounts got a mention by the presenter but the phorm guy didn't really say anything about it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7380384.stm

markyboy7

I've just looked at the Virgin website. Can't find anything about discounts. I'll ring them tomorrow. If they are going to do this I want some money off. If BT give a discount I might think about going to them.

I don't want them looking at all my details for nothing. I might not want them looking at all.

I'll let everyone know what they say on the phone.

Helix

You won't have any luck with Virgin I don't think. The call centre staff are the last to know anything and plus Virgin are the least involved at the moment out of all the ISPs named. BT are actually months away from Launch, Virgin have just mentioned they are interested.

Chroma

Jocatz wrote: »

I'm not very savvy about things such as this. Just how much will they be able to see 'over my shoulder' and will they be storing this information about me somewhere?

Who are these Webwise people do they have a good reputation?

I do all my banking over the net, and feel very worried if any of that information is going to be at risk?

In a nutshell they will be able to see EVERY site you browse that begins with http:// in the address bar.
They will then impersonate that page (ie you'll load up http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/ off of their servers so they can download a cookie of theirs to your computer)
Once the cookie is placed they will allow you to connect to the real site whilst a server in china stores all your profiled information that links to the cookie they placed on your computer.

So in essence they could see that your browsing moneysaving expert and pass along this nice little nugget to say experian or some other credit scoring firm who could then flag you as a credit risk. Experian would merely have to be an OIX partner for this to take place.

As to the reputation. They where previously known as 121 media whos primary line of work was spyware, they offered up a toolbar for internet explorer that logged everything you did in order to pass these details on to their partners.
This software i might add was neigh on impossable to uninstall without a graduate degree in computer science.

Your online banking will MOSTLY take place over https:// sites which wont be monitored (at launch) however some pages of your banks site will be plain old http:// pages so these will be monitored.

Simply put, a completely unregulated company with a more than dubious background wants to see everything you do online in order to provide you with more spam.
This of course comes without any tangible benifit to you or indeed the people who make the sites you visit.
It goes without saying that the technology not only waives your basic human right to privacy, it also breaks several laws in doing so.
But hey it makes a company a few quid so wheres the harm?

I might add that this is only skimming the surface of the technology that will be placed on your connection.
It is capabable of quite a bit more than it will be initialy used for, of course you just have to trust that this unrestricted company holds good to their word and once they realise that this advertising fad isnt nearly as profitable as other malicious uses of the technology they wont do anything untoward.

The only benifit that is offered is webwise/anti-phishing technology which is already freely available with any major webbrowser.

In conclusion, the british public are being herded into some very dark teritory and once the system is up and running there really will be no turning back.
Every man woman and child in the UK will eventualy be profiled and sold as a comodity to the highest bidders, initialy its BT, Virgin and Talk Talk which cover around 75% of the UK. after everythings settled down and people get knocked into complaciancy the other isp's will no doubt follow suit.

For more information check out: http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12/33628733-virgin-media-phorm-webwise-adverts-updated.html (extremely long thread with a lot of reading involved) http://www.badphorm.co.uk/page.php?2 (a decent site that has a varied audience of concerened people down to major tech geeks) http://www.inphormationdesk.org/ (a site dedicated to informing people whats phorm is really all about)

Appologies to the TL;DR crowd for the lenght of this post but theres a lot to be said about it and ive only scratched the tip of the iceberg regarding just how cabable the technology is and how it actualy works.

Florenceanne

After reading up about this phorm and checking its patent on what it can do if scripted to this is not something that ISPs should allow to a third party company. Especialy one with past history on spying , placing rootkits on peoples computers. This program can be scri[ted to harvest anything from your name, address, bankdetails correctly scripted this program could take your identity from your PC without your knowledge.

Conflicting response from Phorm managment and ISPs about who has access to the servers, updates what scripts are placed on these servers.

If in doubt then refuse to allow this to monitor your clicks..

The second bad point about Phorm is this will take possible customers away from smaller business online to their OIX platform businesses, they will accomplish this by using the customers search clicks and data harvested from the website visited to target adverts from their platform only. These may not be the best deal on the internet since they will be the only business on their platform paying them to advertise them. There was also a comment where it was said that website adverts would be changed to ones that are targeted to the ISP customer..

Will this then mean the website owner who is mostlikely paid to allow certain adverts on his website will have these changed for visitors who are on a phormised ISP.

There was talk of reducing the fee you pay for BB allowing the clicks to be used. Sanity needs a recheck since this is not been mentioned by either the ISP just hinted by Phorm management once. Sadly there are many conflicting posts over the internet fro the phorm managment and some ISPs it is hard to tell who is telling the truth and who is skirting the truth.
With a 12 month contract then I would say it isn't worth the risk as that is what you are doing risking your privacy, personal details to someone who was known for his rootkit spyware and Russian scriptors..

socnsum1

Webwise aka Phorm aka OIX aka 121 media (who were a spyware company) think that it is acceptable for all of our private data to be shared around the world by whoever pays for the privelige.

We all want to save money if we can, especially as the credit crunch means that we are all tightening our belts, but people have to understand that if this webwise system comes in online privacy as we know it will be at an end. That for me is too high a price to pay for a discount.

icsys

Was just browsing the site for money saving tips and and noticed the word webwise in the forums.
Everyone wants to save money wherever possible but selling my online privacy isn't the answer.

I note that MoneySaving Expert states 'free of ads'. If I am correct, customers of a Phorm deployed ISP will have ALL their browsing of MoneySaving Expert profiled. The webwise servers will then hijack the web traffic and inject advertisements for all the OIX partners related to finance.
So say for instance you are looking here for information on the best personal loan, you will be served ads from loan companies to entice you to click through to their websites.
Am I correct to assume this?

This is hardly giving me a better online experience. Anyone who is 'web wise' should agree.

I would urge anyone who has not heard of Phorm to do a web search and read up about the impending 'webwise' deployment on the UK's largest ISP networks.

Helix

icsys wrote: »

So say for instance you are looking here for information on the best personal loan, you will be served ads from loan companies to entice you to click through to their websites.
Am I correct to assume this?

The ads wouldn't appear on this site but it would use the information that you were looking for personal loans to provide adverts on other sites (even if they have nothing whatsoever to do with personal loans) which have signed up to display ads from phorm. The ads will only appear on sites which have agreed to have the advertising displayed, so you won't start seeing ads on sites which don't have any ads normally (unless they agree to sign up with phorm).

Not that this makes it any better, but there was some confusion at one point that every site you visit would now have these ads displayed.