So Phorm, the web-shaping privacy-invading ad-mongers and previously purveyors of evil bastard spyware, have taken their “really, we’re not evil” astroturfing campaign to the next level, with a truly bizarre website called Stop Phoul Play. The Phorm-owned site tells us that, actually, far from compromising our browsing privacy they just want to make things better and safer for everyone. Best of all, it’s fronted with a letter from Phorm’s lackey-in-chief Simon Davies (of Phorm-paid privacy consultancy 80/20Thinking and Privacy International who recently wanted to shut down Google’s Streetview service) which uses quite remarkable language. While the site itself uses terms like “privacy pirates” to describe campaigners from NoDPI, a group vocal in their opposition to Phorm, Simon Davies goes on to not-so-obliquely suggest that the NoDPI campaign is less motivated by privacy concerns but by influence – or indeed money – brought to bear on the matter by Phorm’s competitors. The site does a brilliantly hamfister Derek-Draper-esque job of attempting to smear a campaign respresenting a valid concern.

It’s distasteful for so many reasons; first off, the use of the hyper-paranoid conspiracy-wingnut term”privacy pirates” to describe privacy campaigners with a very valid complaint is ludicrous its subtle implications; we have all been told, after all, that “pirates” are part of a global network of evil which, amongst other nefarious activities, supports international terrorism and paedophilia, through the pirates’ distribution of copyright material. The implication by Mr Davies that “there’s a possibility by any standards in the real world that they are also taking money or advice from them or that they have some other vested interest” is more than a little disingenuous, given that this is exactly the position he found himself in when he was consulting for Phorm through 80/20 while campaigning on other privacy issues through Privacy International.

Brilliantly, Phorm’s Phoul Play outburst has been picked up by the FT’s Paul Murphy and Neil Hume in their Alphaville Markets Live session for today, with Hume and Murphy calling the site “pixelated rage from [Phorm’s] CEO Kent Ertugrul” and saying that it “looks like Ertugrul might have lost the plot… not really the sort of thing the CEO of a listed company should be doing. You know this is a huge sell signal, when companies get this aggressive with their critics and the press”.

It’s also worth taking a look at Phorm’s hugely amusing animated presentation explaining how Phorm works. It’s a combination of millinery and “instant data incenerators” apparently; Phorm puts a “hat” on your “unique ID number” (which absolutely and definitely can’t ever be traced back to you or anything personally identifiable like IP address) before tossing the webpages you’ve viewed into their “instant data incenerator”. One of the best things about the presentation is the first screen, which includes a logo for their adware technology “Open Internet Exchange” in the bottom left of the screen, sort of in the place you might expect to see an endorsement from another company. In this context, I wonder how much of a coincidence it is that “Open Internet Exchange” sounds a bit like good things such as the Open Rights Group? I can’t help feeling that the positioning of the brand logo with no real context is misdirection on their part, in the hope that people will just see “Open Internet” and think “oh, well that must be a good thing, and look! Phorm is endorsed by these Open Internet folks”.

Edit: After his comment below, I found this great post on Jamie Dowling’s blog about why probably Phorm is not anonymous after all:

Do you still believe that the claims of companies like Phorm when they say nothing identifiable is recorded by their (still to be proven legal) DPI product “Webwise” ? I never have. This confirms my beliefs and affirms my position as an opponent of Phorm and any peddler of DPI technology to snoop on ISP customers. In their paper “De-Anonymising Social Networks“, Arvind Narayanan and Dr Vitaly Shmatikov from the University Of Texas at Austin present a method by which supposedly “anonymous” data can be turned back into identifiable names and addresses. This is a very disturbing development.

The main lesson of this paper is that anonymity is not sufficient for privacy when dealing with social networks.

There’s also a great rundown on the issues surround Phorm in his post “A Few Facts About Phorm for Newcomers“.