Phorm CEO blames small minority for opposition
Ahead of tomorrow’s crunch BT AGM where online privacy campaigners are vowing to protest and report the company to the police for running tests on a small group of users’ accounts without permission, the CEO of behavioural advertising technology company, Phorm, has been defending its technology.
Kent Ertugru believes the company has been unduly targeted by a “small minority” of privacy advocates for raising issues of privacy which had not been publicly debated before. He claims that it is unfair that the company has been targeted for compromising a web user’s right to privacy when the technology, he claims, is actually designed to protect anonymity.
“The system works by giving those who opt-in a number, we never know who they are, we store no personally identifiable information,” he says.
“We then see what sites they look at so we can understand what they are interested in. We store the things they are interested in, not the actual sites. So we will say somebody is interested in photography and gardening because they’ve been to photography and gardening sites, we will never store what those actual sites were. The result is we can serve up more targeted advertising without storing any personally identifiable information on a person.”
Ertugru believes that the company is being unfairly targeted and that it has done everything in its power to be transparent about how the technology works.
“We’ve been very open, we’ve allowed Ernst and Young and privacy expert Simon Davies at 80/20 Thinking to look at our systems and we’ve had really positive feedback from people that take the time to realise we’re actually solving all the things we’re being accused of,” he says.
“We actually protect privacy better than anyone out there but because we raised the debate there has been a vocal minority which has attracted media attention that don’t understand what we do and misrepresent us.”
Clearly Ertugru believes there is a minority of campaigners who it is almost impossible to win over in a debate but there are also many internet advertising executives who believe he could do more to appease at least brands’ concerns by joining the Internet Advertising Sale Houses (IASH) committee or the Interactive Advertising Burea (IAB). The IASH badge is effectively a kite mark which proves an advertising company abides by privacy protection rules and has been vetted regularly to ensure compliance.
“We’d love Phorm to join us and they’ve introduced themselves to us but they’re not a member and they’re not an applicant,” reveals IASH chairman, James Aitken.
“I really believe they could do a lot to appease public opinion by becoming a member of IASH and working with us.”
Phorm’s response is that it is a member of the IAB, of which IASH is a committee, and so sees no need to join, despite many advertising networks that it hopes will become its clients being IASH members. Phorm believes it is an advertising technology company rather than an advertising network for which the IASH committee is designed.
Against this background Phorm and BT executives will no doubt be interested to see if a planned demonstration against BT’s intended roll out of the technology “in the next few weeks” goes ahead tomorrow at its AGM.
Campaigners are threatening to present the police with a dossier of evidence which, it claims, suggests BT has trialled the technology in the past without user permission. The Information Commissioner ruled this Spring that Phorm can only be launched if users are invited to opt-in, raising the prospect of action against BT if it could be proven to have trialled the technology without warning subscribers.
