Interesting People mailing list archives
Some notes from the Phorm sales pitch
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:53:15 -0700
________________________________________ From: Brian Randell [Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk] Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 12:39 PM To: David Farber Subject: Some notes from the Phorm sales pitch Dave: You've almost certainly been sent this already, but just in case . . . cheers Brian ===== Some notes from the Phorm sales pitch Here are the notes I took from a sales pitch to a client. Although NDAs were passed around, all of the technical and business consulting staff refused to sign them, so this information is freely available and can in no way be considered a trade secret. Some of my notes come from other people's observations in the ensuing PR war. Phorm's sales teams have been aggressively targeting large ISPs with low margins around Europe and the US in the last year or so. They only pitch to board level decision makers, and like to avoid providing any technical detail whenever possible. Phorm has hired a specialty PR company, Citigate Dewe Rogerson [citigatedr.co.uk] to alter public perception of any complaints found in blogs, news programs, and on technical sites. They have been aggressively pasting boilerplate responses about the legality of the system, using carefully sanitized language to obfuscate the debate. The company specialises in mastering public opinion as part of crisis management during corporate fiascos. . . . I will add that the people behind Phorm have been developing and selling malware and adware for a number of years, and apparently made enough money off of an impossible to uninstall adware toolbar to fund this latest push into malware distribution. Their programmers are mostly Saint Petersburg based, home to the Russian Business Network [slashdot.org]. Their servers are kept only in Saint Petersburg and China, so no ISP customer data is ever stored in the UK. Any personally identifying information they obtain about UK citizens can never be seen or purged using existing UK Data Protection Laws. They run under dozens of different domain names, the name of the company has changed from PeopleOnPage to 121media and recently changed from sysip.net to Phorm. This is typical of a company that knows it will have to shed it's tarnished brand every year to stay ahead of public outcry. I expect they already have their next brand lined up when they need to burn the Phorm brand. Sir Tim Berners-Lee has seen their presentation, and held a press conference yesterday to try to stop the practice cold. Even if Phorm is stopped dead tomorrow, the business conditions and legal loopholes are still present to encourage ISPs to try this again and again, and it will certainly be much worse in the US where there is absolutely no legal protections at all, and a ready market for personal data. Full paper at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=489948&cid=22777122 -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/ ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Some notes from the Phorm sales pitch David Farber (Mar 19)