Stealing Phorm's business model (MOD PARENT UP)

[Ian Batten]

On 9 Apr 2008, at 20:05, James Firth wrote:
>
> So I may have to put up with degraded connection full of unwarranted =20=

> 307
> redirects for the duration of the trial, or set up a linux gateway to
> permanently tunnel to my office...

For those that want the real griff, the diagrams are at =
http://webwise.bt.com/webwise/customer_choice.html

Some points come out immediately.  There's no mention whatsoever of =20
the mechanisms to prevent access to non-https webmail services and no =20=

mention of how robots.txt is going to imply not scanning the output =20
from a web server.  That might, of course, be due to the pressures of =20=

time on Phorm's PR agencies (whoops, ``BT Staff'') while the diagrams =20=

were being produced.  And there's one statement that is so far as I =20
can see a straight-forward untruth:

> 	=95 To clean the data, the following are removed:
> 		=95 IP address
> 		=95 Form fields
> 		=95 Email addresses
> 		=95 Numbers
>

Well, they've already said they're going to process search engine =20
strings --- indeed, that's most of their business model.  So when they =20=

say they will remove ``form fields'', that's not true, is it?  And I =20
thought that the only numbers that will get cleaned out are those =20
longer than some number of digits: maths over a field containing only =20=

those numbers larger than 100 doesn't obey the usual rules, does it...

ian