By David Meyer, 15 April 2009 17:32
NEWS
Online shopping giant Amazon has declared that it will not allow its website to be monitored by the targeted-advertising company Phorm.
Phorm monitors users' surfing in order to serve highly targeted advertisements. Its technology is currently being trialled under the name Webwise by BT, with the users' consent. However, BT's first two Phorm trials, carried out in 2006 and 2007, did not have user consent, and on Tuesday, the UK government's failure to censure BT or Phorm for those secret trials resulted in legal proceedings against it by the European Commission.
In a statement on Wednesday, Amazon said: "We have contacted Webwise requesting that we opt-out for all of our domains."
Any owner of a website is free to opt out of having that site tracked by Phorm, and Amazon is the most prominent site operator to do so. Other services that recently opted out of the scheme include the blogging platform LiveJournal and the parenting community Netmums.
On 22 March, campaigners at the Open Rights Group (ORG) sent an open letter to seven companies, including Amazon, calling on them to opt out of Phorm's tracking. The organisation was not convinced that users would have enough information about Phorm's technology to give informed consent to being tracked, ORG chief executive Jim Killock said in the letter.
Killock told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK that content providers such as Amazon "need to know what the public feeling is and that their users are very concerned".
"We are glad that Amazon have [opted out] and taken the lead," Killock said on Wednesday. "They are the first household name to do this. We think it's right because what books you read is potentially sensitive [information]. We think it's particularly good in the light of the EU decision to bring action against the UK government."
To date, none of the other six companies addressed by the ORG's letter - namely Microsoft, Google/YouTube, Facebook, AOL/Bebo, Yahoo! and eBay - has made any statement on whether they intend to opt out of Phorm's tracking.
A spokeswoman for Phorm told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that it was company policy to not comment on specific cases of publishers opting out of the tracking system.
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1. Radical Meldrew
Well done Amazon, a triumph for consumer protection and shame on BT - you really should know better. Surely the safer Phorm option is to provide a customer sign up box. By doing it this way there is no privacy intrusion and if the terms and conditions are made clear there can be no disputes.