p2pnet news view Freedom | Advertising:- “Can I fly it at some point?”

“Da!”

“I’d like to do an aileron roll.”

“Da, sure!”

According to the corporate communities advertising, not love, makes the world go round, and anything they and the people who work for them can do to get hold of private and personal information to be used to ‘target’ people at any time of day, no matter where they are, is acceptable — even if the owners of the information haven’t given permission for their data to be used in this, or any other, way.

Privacy invasion? No worries, not with the likes of the UK and US governments onside.

A US company called Phorm is now inphamous because of its use of DPI — Deep Privacy Invasion — technology, also called Deep Packet Inspection.

What have aileron rolls got to do with anything?

Kent Ertegrul went from Wings Over Moscow flying adventures to found 121media and PeopleOnPage, blacklisted as spyware by such as Symantec and F-Secure, said The Register last year.

Halt Phorm in its tracks

In Canada, federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart launched an important new P2P site specifically to provide detailed and in-depth information on DPI, a, “seemingly neutral technological application that can have a significant impact on privacy rights and other basic civil liberties, especially as market forces, the enthusiasm of technologists and the influence of national security interests grow stronger”.

Alex Hanff has been campaiging for action to halt Phorm in its tracks ever since the company reared its head and yesterday, “The European Commission has started legal action against Britain over online data pirate Phorm,” said p2pnet, going on »»»

The move follows complaints to the EC over how the behavioural advertising `service` was tested on the BT broadband network without the knowledge or permmission of users.

Last year Britain had said it was happy Phorm conformed to European data laws, says the BBC, but, the commission has said Phorm `intercepted` user data without clear consent and the UK need to look again at its online privacy laws.

But in a Reader’s Write, it’s not over yet, said Alex, going on »»»

We have to make sure we keep the pressure on and keep this in public view. The next two months will be interesting and we are all very keen to see what the UK Government does in response to being put on Notice. The question is, will Phorm still be around in 2 months to face charges or will their business now completely collapse as investors lose confidence? Only time will tell but we still intend to organise a meeting with the EU Commission this summer to further the public lobby.

Of course once this has played out we will expand our campaigning to other online privacy issues and the next couple of months we will start looking at bringing our umbrella web site Privacy-Online.org.uk online, which will focus on other threats to online privacy (as opposed to just Deep Packet Inspection).

But when all is said and done, the news today is a great result and really illustrates how much difference the general public can make when they empower themselves to do so.

Forcing a show down

Under Alex’s comment, “I work in Social Media in the capital of Europe in Brussels, but I’m US according to my citizenship and cultural/legal background,” says Linda Margaret, adding »»»

There is a trend in European culture and legal actions towards protection of private personal data, whereas in North American online culture and legal structure, the trend is more towards the protection of online copyright and content ownership and credit. (US concern for copyright is not unlike British concern for libellegally, I mean.)

I think that the UK, already an EU Member State with a history of several concerns regarding State sovereignty being superseded by EU institutions, may have finally forced a real show down with the European Court of Justice.

The UK has been there before (over maintaining the UK measurements, as I’m sure you’ll remember.

If not, a refresher is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyr), and struck a let’s do both UK and EU labeling.

But this time, I think it will be much harder to strike a compromise. You can’t maintain privacy while not maintaining it.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

April 8, 2009