by Sam O'Quinn

Created on: April 27, 2008

Controversial Internet Advertising Technology

Internet advertising is not only a booming business, but also and expanding one. Companies pay big bucks to get their advertisements for their products to you, the audience. When you log on to the Internet, you become a potential customer. Sites, such as Helium, Google, and Yahoo!, among many others, rely on advertisers to keep running. However, when has an advertising company gone too far?

One such company, Phorm, based out of New York, London, and Moscow, recently announced it was working with several United Kingdom-based ISPs to integrate its product into their broadband connections. Phorm's Behavioral Targeting system will monitor surfing habits of the ISP's customer base and then provide focused advertisements based upon the users' search terms and visited websites. While the company claims its system gathers anonymous browsing information through tracking cookies, there have been numerous concerns of privacy issues as the possibility of interception during transmission to third parties.

Phorm's system stores tracking cookies of each website visited, and although they attempt to erase any pertinent information from those cookies, it is still possible that the tracking cookies could be sent to a website that collects personal information, thus giving the user identification cookie important information with the ability to be tracked. It has been speculated that hackers, then, can access the information by sending emails to an ISPs customer base, redirecting them to an https URL, and then capturing the Phorm user identification and the associated email address.

Along with Phorm's potential security and privacy issue, there is also the concern of legality. Critics in the United Kingdom have said that the online advertisement system being proposed is not legal due to the lack of consent among parties that the information is to be intercepted. Phorm system users will have the ability to opt out of the system, although the users' computers will have to be configured to opt out. Phorm has since been declared legal in the UK by the Informational Commissioner's Office.

Another company, NebuAd, Inc., headquartered in Redwood City, California, also uses similar technology and has been operating without the uproar that the opposition in the UK has encountered. Critics say this is due to cultural differences as well as the fact that NebuAd has been kept quieter than Phorm, which is a publicly traded company.

According to

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