Phorm

» see phorm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

TTNet was the default answer to the question of who gave you internet in Turkey, and in 2012 it was mine. That is the year Phorm went live on TTNet's network under a Turkish brand called Gezinti. Nothing about it showed up on the modem or on any bill I ever read. The design of the product was that it sat one layer below the place you would think to look.

Phorm was incorporated in Delaware in 2002 under the name 121Media, and its business then was adware. It distributed a program called PeopleOnPage, built on an advertising engine called ContextPlus that also shipped as a rootkit named Apropos, which resisted removal and reported browsing habits back to a server. F-Secure classified both as spyware. ContextPlus stopped distributing in May 2006 after a run of lawsuits against adware vendors, and by September 2007 the company was called Phorm and was saying out loud that it had closed a multimillion-dollar revenue stream because people could no longer tell adware from spyware.

The new idea was to move the same function up the wire. Rather than ask a user to install anything, Phorm proposed to put hardware inside the internet provider and read traffic as it passed, building an interest profile from the pages a subscriber visited and then selling advertising against it. The consumer-facing half was branded Webwise. Phorm's case was that the profile stayed anonymous behind a cookie ID, and that this protected privacy better than the alternatives because nothing personal was ever stored.

British reaction was immediate and it never softened. Tim Berners-Lee said of his browsing history, "It's mine, you can't have it," and added that he would change providers if his ISP introduced the system. Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge, put it to the Evening Standard as an instruction: "if you care about your privacy, do not use BT, Virgin or Talk-Talk as your internet provider." The Foundation for Information Policy Research argued the whole arrangement was unlawful interception, since both parties to a communication have to consent. The Information Commissioner's Office said it could only be legal opt-in. Amazon and the Wikimedia Foundation opted their sites out of being profiled at all.

~ the record ~

~ what bt did in 2006 ~

The Register reported on 1 April 2008 that BT had run a secret trial two years earlier, intercepting and profiling the web browsing of 18,000 of its broadband customers. BT's own technical report stated that the participants were not made aware, because one aim of the validation was to leave their experience unaffected. After initial denials BT confirmed a second prototype trial at one exchange in 2007, involving tens of thousands of end users. A public trial finally started on 30 September 2008.

The City of London Police declined to open a formal investigation in September 2008. The Crown Prosecution Service reviewed the case and decided in April 2011 not to prosecute, on the basis that neither Phorm nor BT had acted in bad faith. The European Commission had opened infringement proceedings against the United Kingdom in April 2009 and dropped them in January 2012. None of that was the thing that actually stopped it. In July 2009 the Wall Street Journal reported that BT had no plans to deploy after all and was concentrating on other opportunities, and Phorm's share price fell 40 percent.

~ the turkish years ~

What was left was everywhere else. Phorm signed Romtelecom in Romania, Oi and Telefónica in Brazil, KT in South Korea, and TTNet in Turkey, and moved its registration to Singapore in 2012. By the company's own 2015 statement there were over 20 million daily users on the platform globally, and the large majority of them were Turkish, because TTNet was never one provider among several here. It was the broadband layer of a former state monopoly.

Turkey got the product under a name of its own. Gezinti was presented as an advertising portal rather than as a traffic-inspection system, and the arrangement was documented publicly by sosyalmedya.co only months after it went live. Alternatif Bilişim, a Turkish digital rights association, ran a campaign against it called enPHORMasyon, with a site laying out what deep packet inspection on a national ISP meant in practice. CNN Türk and Cumhuriyet picked it up. The deployment continued.

This is the part that makes Phorm worth a grave rather than a footnote. In Britain it drew a police referral and a European Commission case and never shipped commercially. In Turkey it shipped and then ran for three years, supplying most of the company's headline user count. In January 2015 Phorm told the market it was moving to a remote cookie option while scaling back Turkish operations, which is the language a company uses when the thing keeping it alive stops.

~ the shares ~

Kent Ertugrul resigned as chief executive and chairman on 15 July 2015. Trading in Phorm Corporation's shares was suspended on London's AIM market on 24 February 2016 pending clarification of the company's financial position, with Phorm saying it had been unable to secure the equity funding it needed and was in discussions about alternatives with no guarantee of any money being raised. It ceased trading on 14 April 2016 and was deleted from the FTSE AIM All-Share Index from the start of trading on 18 May. Today phorm.com redirects to the site of an Indonesian battery manufacturer, and gezinti.com answers with a hundred-odd bytes of JavaScript that bounces you to a domain-parking lander.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »