Alex Hanff: geek to activist
p2pnet news view P2P:- The Internet is the greatest equaliser the world has ever known.
With it, people everywhere have a voice so loud and powerful it can’t be ignored, something Alex Hanff would attest to.
He’s only one man. But he took on Phorm, a multi-million-dollar advertising company with an entire advertising and communications industry behind it, and brought it to its knees.
That’s Alex on the right during his BBC debate with Phorm boss Kent Ertugrul.
“The last 5 days has been beyond a doubt the most difficult week Phorm has had to face since the story first broke in February 2008 that they had partnered with BT Group PLC, Virgin Media and TalkTalk,” said Alex on NoDPI.org, his website, going on:
“On Monday shortly after midnight, Richard Wray from the Guardian published a story stating BT Group had announced they have no plans to use Phorm`s WebWise technology to intercept and copy all non-encrypted web communications of their customers for the purpose of behavioural advertising.
“Phorm`s shares on AIM collapsed as a result shedding 40% of their value before markets closed.”
P2P People Power.
Alex has now moved on to Ethical Networks, a Privacy International project managed by Privacy International.
Stay tuned on that, and meanwhile, “Over the past 18 months many will have become familiar with the campaign against Phorm Inc, a company who planned to deploy black box Deep Packet Inspection technology throughout the three largest UK ISPs for the purpose of spying on all their customer’s web activities so they could build behavioural profiles which would be used to deliver behavioural targetted advertising via their Open Internet Exchange (OIX) network,” says Alex. ” Indeed, p2pnet (thanks Jon) has run a string of articles on the issue for the better part of that 18 month period.”
He goes on »»»
It has been a difficult 18 months, one that started just as I had begun writing my BA dissertation in Applied Social Science. I had returned to University (after years of consulting and teaching work in the IT sector) when my son was born; deciding that I did not want to spend so much time away from home and miss my son growing up (a decision I am very glad to have taken). But I decided when returning to University that I did not want to waste the 15 years of experience I had gained working in the IT industry but that instead I wanted to use that experience and study the impact of technology on society. So I chose to study a joint major in Applied Social Science and Information Systems, and over the years of study I was lucky to find that my lecturers and tutors we very tolerant of my papers, which always took the topic to be written about and made them relevant to my goal – the impact of technology on society. I wrote papers about Biometric Fingerprinting of School Children, The Digital Divide, TeenScreen (a paper on ethics) and many others.
My final year group project was a viability study of using Open Source Software solutions coupled with Thin Clients and Linux Terminal Server Project to provide free and low cost IT training solutions for low income communities; and my final piece of independent work (my dissertation) was originally going to be an Impact Assessment on the the use of primarily Microsoft proprietary software in the public sector, which would look at the impact on competition, innovation, the national curriculum and the wider economy.
However, in February 2008, just a few months before my dissertation was due to be completed, I found myself writing an independent paper providing a legal analysis of Phorm Inc. and BT Group PLC’s covert trials of Phorm’s technology in 2006/2007. I have always had an interest in Law but had never delved so deeply into technical and legislative documents, meaning the paper was taking up a great deal of my time. So the topic of my dissertation was changed and the Phorm paper became the focus of both my academic and privacy work.
Then everything seemed to move into fastforward mode – my commitment to campaigning against Phorm’s technology led me to the House of Lords, a public protest outside BT’s Annual General Meeting as well as a great deal of attention from the press and media. It was clear that given the number of contacts that I had developed and the growing support for the campaign web site (NoDPI) I had a responsibility to continue with my work on the campaign.
Now looking back over the past 18 months I have been involved in some truly amazing events including being involved in organising a “Round Table” event at the House of Lords with guests such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee; a meeting with Commissioner Vivian Redding’s office at the European Commission in Brussels; multiple press interviews, tv and national radio shows; sitting on a panel on Internet Privacy at the Convention on Modern Liberty and taking part in an All Parliamentary Inquiry on Communications Data. I have been branded as a “Privacy Pirate”, “Serial Activist” and “The Angry Activist” on Phorm’s smear web site StopPhoulPlay and I have been constantly insulted and misrepresented by Phorm’s supporters.
However, it was all worth it – as today we see Phorm as mere shadow of their former selves – their stock in sharp decline with losses in market capitalisation somewhere in the region of $900 Million USD (about 95% of their worth) and all three of their UK ISP partners dropping them in the past month. We have seen major web sites such as Wikimedia Group and many others, actively opting out of Phorm’s profiling system on the grounds of the dangers this technology poses to their user’s privacy and we have seen every Government department in the UK distance themselves from Phorm in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
I decided early on in the campaign that this was the type of work I wanted to be doing – it was important and something I am extremely passionate about but most importantly there are so few people doing it. There is no financial incentive to become a public lobbyist as there is for corporate lobbies who earn six figure salaries and it takes a great deal of time – so it is no surpise there are relatively few to take up the cause. So when Privacy International (an organisation I had cited during my studies and one I have a great deal of respect for) offered me the opportunity to join their team, I was understandably eager to accept.
It has taken a couple of months since taking up the role as my time has still been divided between the project I am working on for Privacy International and my ongoing work with the Phorm Campaign; but now I am ready to launch what will be my first project with Privacy International.
We are very concerned at the changes we are seeing in the advertising industry towards behavioural models and the apparent disregard for people’s personal and communications data in favour of high profits. We believe that any system which uses personal data and communications should only be permitted in the presence of Informed Consent (Opt-In) models – a view which is diametrically opposed to the model of Opt-Out that the industry is lobbying so hard for.
To that end we have launched a new web site which will serve as our portal to the project including a blog and document archive of work carried out for the project. We will be pushing on three fronts over the coming years to force regulatory changes (or adoption in countries where regulations currently do not exist) to develop an international regulatory framework based on Informed Consent; to collaborate with industry to change their models from implied to informed consent and to educate the general public on privacy in order that they can take more responsibility for their private data and communications. It is a vast project and will take a great deal of time and effort to run – but it is one we feel is essential to protect the international population from the misuse of their data in a time where such data is both trivial to acquire and highly in demand.
The web site is called Ethical Networks (www.ethicalnetworks.org) and our pilot project is an Annual International Mobile Broadband Privacy Review. We chose this after members of the public raised their concerns that many of the Service Providers offering Mobile Broadband (on 3G networks in the UK) had prejudicial terms and conditions in their contracts with customers, giving the Service Providers absolute rights over the disclosure of their customer’s communications data – including but not limited to email, sms and web browsing.
We feel that such terms are unethical and probably illegal in the UK under various consumer protection regulations and privacy laws and as such have already initiated talks with Service Providers in the UK. We believe for example, that subscribers to O2’s iPhone service plan would be shocked to discover that everything they do on their iPhone with regards to communications (whether they be on the Internet or on the standard voice network) can be disclosed to third party advertising and marketing corporations under section 12 of O2’s existing terms and conditions. We have taken O2 to task on this issue and have urged them to make changes to their contracts and seek to obtain the informed consent of their customers instead of the implied consent they currently use. Such terms are commonplace and we intend to review all of them – not just in the UK but globally. Once all the data has been compiled and interpretted the review will be published and then each year following we will do a new review to see how global practises are changing.
We urge readers from where ever they are in the world to send us copies of the Terms and Conditions/Privacy Policies of their Mobile/Cellular Providers so they can be included in the review, which can be done by emailing them to mbpr@ethicalnetworks.org and if possible we would ask that if the terms are not in english that a transcript in english be provided along with the copy.
It is time that we made privacy a priority, if we don’t act now then before we know it privacy laws will be useless as even if regulatory changes do happen, the data about each and every one of us will already be saturating the public domain.
In closing, I would like to thank my family for their tolerance and support over the past couple of years; the general public for their support and of course Privacy International for believing in me and inviting me to join their team. With the support of everyone mentioned I have confidence that we can change the world for the better.
Alex Hanff
Cheers, Alex. And all the best …
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
July, 2009
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July 27th, 2009 at 5:52 am
Alex is finally getting the publicity that he craves…
July 28th, 2009 at 6:03 am
Alex Hanff’s only doing this so he can feel important.
And the idea that it was he who brought down Phorm is risible.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I know Alex from way back. I have no doubts in my mind that doing this will make him feel important, he’s always had a big ego and craves attention, but it takes somebody like that with a little arrogance and cockyness to stand up against these corporate clowns. I say yes he’s loving the attention, but I know I would if I was up there. its david vs goliath, good on Alex for giving it a shot.