Re-posted with permission from http://www.badphorm.co.uk/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?632. Needs as much publicity as possible.
Many thanks to The Other Steve at the regester message board
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/10/isps_phorm_comment_target_market/comments/
Hey I said they wer lying to us all the time.
OK PHORM PR GET OUT OF THIS you have been spreading lies over the internet, yet your patent says otherwise.
Posted Monday 10th March 2008 13:36 GMT
http://www.politicalpenguin.org.uk/blog/p,295/
Including information from Etregul’s patent, which at least one of us ought to have thought of, oh well.
Juiciest bits from the patent, because I know you’ll all love this, but go have a look, it’s a truly excellent piece. See if any of this sounds familiar…
“Furthermore, though the present disclosure discusses HTTP traffic in many examples, it will be appreciated that other types of protocols and traffic may be employed in connection with the targeted advertising system and method described herein.”
Woops.
“Context reader 40 is not limited to acquiring keyword or other contextual information pertaining to a given web page. Indeed, the browsing information may be collected so as to also include historical data pertaining to the browsing performed ”
Ouch.
“Based on analysis occurring at the proxy server, the proxy server may modify client-requested data it receives so that a targeted advertisement appears on a web page requested by a client”
Oh dear.
“As explained above, the context reader may be configured to more than just keyword and other contextual data pertaining to a given web page. The context reader may also include behavioral data (e.g, browsing behavior), other historical data collected over time, demographic data associated with the user, IP address, URL data, etc.”
Oh Phorm, have you been telling us some MASSIVE porkies or what ?
The patent (linked at the above blog) is pretty dense, as you would expect, and contains plenty more of this kind of stuff. No doubt Phorm’s hapless spinmeisters will be around to tell us that this isn’t the technology they are going to implement NOW, and who knows, they might even be telling the truth*. But Phorm have lodged a patent application for technology that does indeed do all the things they have just assured us that they definitely won’t do, ever, honest, we promise, cross our hearts.
Phail !
Props to Political Penguin for digging this up, looks like a smoking gun to me. Why patent a technology that you aren’t going to use ?
* Really, they might. After all they did have Simon Davies look at it.