Phorm Infringed Users’ Privacy

Phorm Infringed Users’ Privacy

During this week Phorm was asked to exclude domains and websites and refrain from scanning the pages of several resources at once. The first one who took this view was Amazon. The Open Rights Group supporteded the bookseller's decision. The ORG has written to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, AOL/Bebo, Yahoo! and eBay asking them to take similar action and protect their users. The last one was the request of The Wikimedia Foundation who asked Phorm to exclude all its domains and websites - including Wikipedia - from Phorm's BT trials, because it considers such scanning to be an infringement of its users' privacy. Phorm's automated reply said it was likely the ban would go into effect within 48 hours. It runs a system which allows webmasters to exclude their sites from its trials. The last straw that broke the camel’s back was an announcement of the European Commission about the infringement action against the UK government for failing to take action over secret trials run by Phorm and BT.