Endorser Quotes
Here are just some of the good things observers from all spheres: press, ad industry and Parliament have had to say about Phorm, OIX and Webwise.
Headline: Strategy Verdict - Launch of Open Internet Exchange Publication: Media Week Journalist: Dave Katz
"Advertising exchanges could be the next big thing...Phorm's Open Internet Exchange, led by ex-Telegraph boss Hugo Drayton, will be opening for business shortly" "Phorm's ad-exchange, OIX, goes a step further. It adds behavioural data accrued from the three largest UK ISPs, which accounts for 70% of web users" "The fact that is creating such value at a lower cost is certainly very clever...I suspect that OIX will be around for a very long time"
Headline: Storm about Phorm Publication: Web User Journalist: Ben Camm-Jones
"Simon Davies of Privacy International (www.privacyinternational.org
Headline: Phorm and function fuel privacy fears Publication: Marketing Journalist: Andrew Walmsley
"Phorm is different. Through a deal with ISPs it watches everything you watch...but Phorm discards the source information after. In that sense, it is a lot less worrying than equivalent technologies offered by Google, Yahoo! And Microsoft...It may be that what Phorm does is less invasive of privacy than many of it's rivals practices"
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer, leading a debate in the House of Lords on data protection, June 12, 2008 Source: House of Lords Hansard
"Mass data collection and retention is not the sole domain of government. The private sector has been years ahead in seeing the commercial potential in data collection. However, collection is one thing but the problems arise in its retention--how is it stored, how is it accessed and by whom? Even the technology that I understand and use--the memory stick, for example--allows vast amounts of data to be downloaded in one place and removed to another, just as we were talking about in the Statement. More sophisticated is the collection of information by Google, for example, in developing targeted advertising. There are all kinds of technological advances which are hard to grasp.
I was talking with the chief executive of Phorm this week who told me that once something is stored you have lost control over it. Phorm has been the subject of an interesting article in the Economist recently which some of your Lordships may have read. It is a company on the cutting edge of what can protect the public. A bit of controversy surrounds its work because, with its client BT, it intercepted people's online business without BT customers knowing. But Phorm is certainly correct when it says that if consumers knew what was actually stored they would decide to opt for true anonymity online. This is what Phorm is trying to develop with major telecommunications clients on a global scale."
David Evans, British Computer Society
"Phorm's willingness to engage in open public debate on the impacts of their system is to be commended," continues David Clarke. "Rather than retreating to the bunker, Phorm has faced their critics, and this has helped focus on the real issues rather than the imagined ones. This is an approach we would like to see companies take more regularly."
