I allow access but not for commercial gain.. What phorm would do would break my website copyright. As they would harvest my site for commercial gain..

(i) With Phorm at least, that ‘just a number’ is written into a cookie phorged to look as if it came from the website you just visited. For *every* website you visit, and its third party links, and so readable by that website and its third parties. It’s a tracker’s wet dream come true.

(ii) With dpi, the ad content you see may be relevant to you, but it may not be relevant at all to the website you are visiting. Browse plasma TVs and then go to a site to choose a new SUV, and Phorm and NebuAd will serve you ads for plasma TVs while you’re there. They are always a beat behind. Is that going to be annoying, do you think?

(iii) It isn’t just *you* that should have the opt-in/opt-out choice. It’s all the websites you visit, as well. Why should they work hard to craft interesting content, only to have it picked over by Phorm and NebuAd so they can serve you ads on *rival* sites, and thus deprive the first website owner of his/her proper due?

Phorm, certainly, has no good mechanism to deal with this – and in the UK, where our equivalent of your wiretap legislation is RIPA, this requires the consent of *both* parties, the person browsing and the website browsed, before Phorm can legally operate. Accordingly, it’s hard to see how Phorm can claim to be legal over here.