Wikimedia becomes latest to ban Phorm
They'd have made a lovely couple
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The Wikimedia Foundation has 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.
Earlier this week Amazon took the same view and asked Phorm to refrain from scanning its pages.
The Open Rights Group welcomed 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.
Phorm runs a system to allow webmasters to get their sites excluded from its trials.
The company suffered another blow this week when the European Commission announced infringement action against the UK government for failing to take action over secret trials run by Phorm and BT.
There has also been criticism of the dual role of Kip Meek - Phorm director and adviser to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. ®
COMMENTS
robots
I have sent an email to Google highlighting my concerns about Phorm/webwise abusing the robots.txt system which Google not only respects, but also depends on for quality search results.
Perhaps everyone should do the same?
Along with the other more obvious concerns, it may go some way in encouraging the Google folk to make a stand.
El Reg
I know I'm not the first to ask, but can we please have an official statement from El Reg?
How about
Someone draws some packet sniffer data, so it becomes possible to signature these assholes and fence them off completely.
They'll get bored pretty quickly if they have to keep avoiding blacklists every day.
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