As anyone even half-awake knows, there has been a storm of protest over Phorm. I won’t reiterate the basic arguments, but I am intrigued by a couple of inconsistencies and/or misleading statements I’m spotting from Phorm’s techies.
In an interview in The Register, Phorm’s “top boffin” Marc Burgess says
What the profiler does is it first cleans the data. It’s looking at two sets of information: the information in the request that’s sent to the website and then information in the page that comes back.
From the request it pulls out the URL, and if that URL is a well known search engine such as Google or Yahoo! it’ll also look for the search terms that are in the request.
And then from the information returned by the website, the profiler looks at the content. The first thing it does is it ignores several classes of information that could potentially be sensitive. So there’s no form fields, no numbers, no email addresses (that is something containing an “@”) and anything containing a title like Mr or Mrs.
he says “there’s no form fields”. But this is in the response from the webserver. Form fields in the request sent to the webserver are fair game, it seems. In other words, Phorm are quite happy to spy on what you type, but will ignore form fields sent to you by the server – well, that’s big of them: those fields are usually empty. It’s interesting that many people have picked this up as a contradiction (that is, how can there be no form fields if you are looking at search terms, which are entered into a form field?) – but it has been carefully worded so that it is not contradictory, just easy to misinterpret.
Phorm can completely adhere to this public statement and yet still look at everything you typed. Note also that they only talk about filtering senstive data in the response and not in the request. So nothing, it seems, is really sacred.
Incidentally, they are silent about what they do with the body of the request (usually when you submit a form, the fields end up in the body rather than the URL). That fills me with curiosity.
Even ORG swallow this bit of propaganda (from ORG’s post)
Phorm assigns a userâ€™s browser a unique identifying number, which, it is claimed, nobody can associate with your IP address, not even your ISP.
Of course, this is nonsense. The ISP can easily associate the identifying number with your IP address – all they have to do is watch the traffic and see which IP address sends the cookie with the Phorm ID in it. In fact, they could probably use the Phorm box for this, since it already sees all the data.
and Phorm’s CEO, Kent Ertegrul, again in the interview with The Register
It’s important to understand the distinction between actually recording stuff and concluding stuff. All of our systems sit inside BT’s network. Phorm has no way of going into the system and querying “what was cookie 1000062 doing?”. And even if we did we have no way of knowing who 1000062 was. And even if we did all we could pull out of it is product categories. There’s just no way of understanding where you’ve been, what you’ve done, what you’ve searched for.
They say this, but we have to take their word for it. Obviously the fact it sits inside BT’s network is no barrier to them connecting to it. Clearly they could just look at the traffic traversing the system and know exactly what cookie 1000062 is doing. And which IP address is doing it, which doesn’t tell you who is doing it, but certainly narrows it down. Analysis of the data will almost certainly allow identification of the individual concerned, of course.
Not, of course, that taking people’s word for their privacy practices is unacceptable – it is pretty much unavoidable. What I object to is Phorm’s attempts to convince us that it is impossible for them to misbehave. Of course, it is not.
Now let’s take a look at BT’s FAQ
Is my data still viewed when I am not participating?
No, when you don’t participate or switch the system off — it’s off. 100%. No browsing data whatsoever is looked at or processed by BT Webwise. . We should be clear: the Phorm servers are located in BT’s network and browsing data is not transmitted outside. Even if you are opted out, websites will still show you ads (as they do now) but these will not be ads from the Phorm service and they will not be more relevant to your browsing. In addition, you will also not get extra protection from fraudulent websites.
This is just obviously a lie. Since opt-out is controlled by a cookie, the system must look at your browsing data in order to determine whether you have the opt-out cookie or not. Naughty BT.
Furthermore, it is difficult to imagine how they could architect a system where your data did not traverse some box doing interception, though it may, of course, decide not to look at that data. But once more we’d have to take their word for it. How can we ever be sure they are not? Only by having our data not go to the box at all.
Talk Talk say they are going to architect their system in this way, somewhere in the comments on this post. I await details with interest – I can’t see how they can do it, except by either pushing the traffic through some other interception box, which doesn’t really change the situation at all, or by choosing whether to send to the Phorm box on the basis of IP address – which does not identify the user, so, for example, I could find myself opted-in by my children, without my knowledge!
All these worries apply to the system working as intended. What would happen if the Phorm box got pwned, I dread to think. I hope they’ve done their homework on hardening it! Of course, since they have “no access to the system”, it’ll be interesting to see how they plan to keep it up-to-date as attacks against it evolve.