Imagine if the next time you went shopping someone followed you around and made a note of everything you looked at or picked up. Then, using that information about you other shop keepers were told to wander up and sell their wares just on the basis of something you’d looked at a moment ago.

If you use BT, Virgin Media or Carphone Warehouse as an ISP that will be happening soon to you. For ages now ISPs have looked on enviously as the likes of Google made revenue from advertising on the web. Now with the formation of a company called Phorm ISPs will have a chance to get some of that revenue.

These ISPs have agreed to give Phorm access to their customers’ surfing records, letting it track their every move. Using this information an advertisement can be sent directly to the marketer’s target audience, anywhere on the Web, rather than hoping an Internet user lands on a site displaying that ad.

Phorm used to be known as 121 Media Inc, a company with a murky past in adware and spyware. Now reborn it’s facing several searching questions about it’s new business and the financial stability of it. It’s rumoured to have paid BT T £85 million for the ability to install it’s servers deep within the BT network where they will capture BT customers clickstreams.

As Political Penguin notes :

Political Penguin

I’m sure you can understand people’s concerns that a company which on paper only appears to have a virtual and or shared office space in London and an address in Delaware in the US that has previously been identified as a base of operations or indeed simply a forwarding mail service for e-mail spam/scams so I’d like to ask a few questions regarding these two registered addresses.

What about URLs with bank details contained in them ? Who sees those ? What happens to the ability to opt out of the system, does the ISP scan your PC for the opt-out cookie every time you browse ?

Do you really want that ?