Thoughts 10 Apr 2008 04:56 pm
Phorm cookies
Phorm, a British company has found a way to make cookies that track every page you visit on the Internet.
These cookies attach themselves to other companies cookies so at the end of the day, they not only know where you’ve been, but how you got there and everything you did while visiting.
All this data is collected in one place instead of being scattered through various companies. — Kind of like an RFID for your computer.
In this country the much bigger company is NebuAD that gets data directly from your ISP, but doesn’t keep any sort of personal information.
According to the CEO of NebuAD:
“We built our system such that, as we map a user over and over again… that mapping is reflected only as a hash number, not as any personally identifiable information, not even an IP address… All we track is that somebody qualified for certain interest categories… We don’t keep the raw data about what searches they did.”
All of this is to serve ads and…… perhaps add to Uncles already massive data collection…… Nah. These companies wouldn’t do that, they gave us their word. After all they must be at least as honest and upright as AT&T or Verizon……….