Frank_Rizzo - 8:05 pm on Jun 6, 2008 (gmt 0)

It is still debatable as to what opt-in actually means here. Amongst all the spin and fud this question put to BT and Phorm has still not been answered satisfactorily:

"If I do not opt-in will I still be profiled"

Not opting in will only stop the user being served OIX ads. His profile will STILL be made - he will still be monitored.

I believe they may be working on a fix for that and it could be the reason why trial #3 is beinc constantly delayed.

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Now back to the member area/piggybacking the traffic. This is a serious concern I have as one of my sites has 'finacial information' where subscribers can analyse data, talk in the non public domain message board etc.

Some phorm huggers say the onus is now on me to convert to full https but why should I do that? This is a problem I never had before.

My security systems has worked fine and keeps out freeloaders and such but there is no way I can keep out a Phormed user who will be leaking my and my customers private information.

I kid you not that it was suggest that we have to block googlebot in robots.txt if we want to stop Phorm from profiling our sites. The response from BT/Phorm was that any site which lets google in is deemed to be in the public domain and that if you let google in Phorm have every right to read that same data.

Of course that is totally unfair as I choose to let google crawl mysite in order that I can have the benefit of increased traffic. Allowing Phorm to analyse my pages will give me no benefit and may actually give benefit to a rival site who has signed up to OIX.

And of course - I don't let googlebot anywhere near the members area, or the parts of the messageboard which require registration. Yet Phorm can waltz in and analyse the pages.