I’m Mark Thompson and I setup the petition about Phorm on the 10 Downing street website. In recent days Phorm decided to go on the attack and have published a website which attacks its critics in a very personal and unprofessional manner.

Link: http://www.stopphoulplay.com/

They leave very few options on the site to address the factual errors contained within the site. I started off by trying to respond to various blog posts individualy on this issue in an effort to set the record straight, but thought I’d try my hand at blogging about it myself and seeing how it works out.

I would like to basically highlight one segment of information that Phorm have put up on their website, it is the section on the Downing street petition. The reason I’m highlighting this one section is to attempt to show how Phorm are incorrect and misleading in the way they have portrayed what happened, they have attacked the petition and they have attacked me by  labelling me a ‘Privacy Pirate’ and they have said that I have desecrated the long history of petitioning that is established in this country. They also claim the petition was misleading by claiming I was using scare tactics by wording the petition to make it seem like Phorm was illegal.

Now, I’d like to take this apart piece by piece, so:

“On 3 March 2008, in search of a new avenue to attack the company, anti-Phorm privacy pirates started a petition using the open facility on the 10 Downing Street website.”

Who are these ‘anti-phorm pirates’ who started this petition ? The truth is that it was little old me, At the time I created the petition I knew nobody else involved in the fight againt Phorm. There was just me, by myself, a chap who works in IT and who has an interest in technology and anything geeky. Sure, I discussed it with work colleagues (a Huge thanks to Silverwave for helping me understand how Phorm really works), and I read up about Phorm, I had concerns about it and I was surprised to find that despite many other people who also had concerns, nobody had raised a petition about it. I decided to raise a petition on 10 Downing Street and ask the government to investigate. There was no group of ‘Privacy Pirates’ there was simply me. But hey, if you want to publicly attack a private citizen and characterise me in this way, who am I to stop you ?

“In the United Kingdom, the tradition of raising a popular petition against a perceived miscarriage of justice has a long and distinguished pedigree, but not one that the privacy pirates felt any hesitation about desecrating. The purpose of using the Downing Street website was, as we have come to understand, to lend credibility to a wholly spurious project.”

What ? So you are accusing me of desecrating the long and distinguished tradition of raising petitions, by raising a petition!  How dare you. Phorm have had no contact with me so how the heck would they know how I felt. As someone who passionately  believes in the concept of democracy, the right of petition, the rights of a citizen etc, I find this comment offensive and idiotic.

Ok, I’ve read and reread what I put, where do I imply that Phorm’s technology is illegal. I imply nothing, I ask the question and that is the whole point of the petition. I do not state that Phorm’s technology is illegal, I ask my Government to investigate this technology and make that decision, look, I’ll even highlight the important bits for you:

 “We petition the Prime Minister to investigate the Phorm technology and if found to breach UK or European privacy laws then ban all ISP’s from adopting it’s use. Additionally the privacy laws should be reviewed to cover any future technologies such as Phorm.

“The UK’s three largest ISP’s, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk are all in talks with a view to introducing the Phorm technology. This would result in the browsing habits of the majority of the UK population being sold to a third party for advertising  purposes. The opt-out system for this technology is vague and unproven, even when opting out your every move on the Internet might be recorded. Surely this must be a breach of privacy laws, if not then the privacy laws need to be changed to cover such invasive technology.”

Hell, if you were going to get picky about the wording of anything at least attempt to pull it to bits on the section where I mention the ‘results being sold to a third party’ that’s the bit that turned out to be somewhat inaccurate, although at the time of the petition I wasn’t to know that, as Phorm where not very forthcoming with answers. What was I supposed to do, run the wording past Phorm first to make sure they were ‘comforted’ with my wording, maybe seek Kent’s personal approval before I went ahead and desecrated the democratic foundations of this nation. Look, I’m one guy, I’m no Shakespeare, so maybe I haven’t worded the petition brilliantly, but then I didn’t have an army of PR people to analyse it beforehand.

“In order to drum up support for this slanted petition, the privacy pirates started an aggressive campaign in which, among other tactics, they appear to have persuaded some of their own people to maximise the number of signatures by posing as multiple personalities. Someone even signed the name Kent Ertugrul, CEO of Phorm – twice.”

Slanted ? in what way ? Was the petition picked up and passed around various sites that have a dislike for the Phorm technology, yes of course it was! That’s the idea of petitions, to get like minded people to signup to show their support. As for the issue of multiple signup’s, I have no control over that and certainly never encouraged it. As for the issue of Kent signing Twice, there was really no need, once would have been enough

“The Truth:

The total number of signatures in support of the petition was 21,403, or 0.2% of the combined broadband subscriber base of the UK’s three largest ISPs. Furthermore, the signatories – if indeed they are all real people – were in effect misled into supporting the false proposition that Phorm is illegal that, had it been true, ought to have been supported by the entire country – including the CEO and employees of Phorm.”

The truth is that the petition ran for 1 year, for most of that time it stayed in the top 10, at the time it expired it was the 4th most popular petition on the site. Given the technical nature of the issue at hand, the fact that most people don’t understand it and fall asleep if you try to explain it, I think 21,403 signatures was a remarkable achievement and really shows how unpopular this form of technology has become, it is also a benchmark in highlighting how spectacular the PR failure has been on the part of Phorm and how they have failed from the start to be Honest, Transparent, Open and embrace any form of real dialogue with concerned people such as myself.

“The website managers at 10 Downing Street recognised their mistake in allowing a misleading petition to appear on their site, and have since provided assurances to Phorm that they will not permit this to happen again.”

Yet misleading petitions are usually removed from the site and this petition is still there. I have contacted the website team myself to ask for clarification on this matter, ask for any evidence if the petition has been judged to be misleading, and also ask what assurances have been provided to Phorm.

Ok, so that’s a long winded rebuttal of what Phorm have had to say. Look, at the end of the day I’m nobody. I’m certainly not a member of some Anti-Phorm league of corporate fighting super villains, heck I failed to even get given one of the cool nicknames Phorm seem to have given to these ‘Privacy Pirates’ (Personally I quite like ‘The Petitioner’). But in all seriousness, the actions of Phorm, to make this issue as personal as they have, is a disgrace. It does nothing but show how unprofessional  the company is, how delusional the management are at the highest level and what little respect they have for ordinary people who happen to disagree with their technology.

Phorm have failed to engage in any meaningful debate, they have resorted to misguided PR attempts to manipulate facts, they have spent more time focused on trying to discredit opponents rather than take the opportunity to welcome them onboard and work with them to adapt their technology and procedures to make a business case that would be acceptable. The sad thing really, is that at the start of this I never had it in for Phorm, I was quite willing to accept that there was a place for behavioural advertising if done correctly. I felt Phorm had the opportunity to shape that future and had a responsibility to educate the wider public to its benefits. They failed to do this.

They have resorted to scare tactics, naming and shaming, distorting and misleading the public, quoting things as ‘facts’ when they have not even researched them or contacted the people for confirmation. Usually I would be quite happy to directly contact a company when things have been so obviously misinterpreted as they have in this case, but I’m half expecting Phorm to try and dig up some dirt on me and publish it on their website as they have done with some other people.

Is this an example of their ‘Gold’ standard in privacy ?, is this how they showcase their ‘Privacy Revolution’. If so then bravo, you have done more damage to your public image than any of your detractors could possibly have achieved, Take a bow Mr Ertugrul, you deserve it.

Sorry to have waffled on for so long in what seems like an exercise in self promotion. This really is not about me setting up a petition or trying to get 5 minutes of internet fame (not that for one second am I claiming this issue warrants it). This is about showing how if Phorm can get it so wrong about this particular point, then how can they be trusted on the other points they have raised on their ‘smear’ website.

I humbly request that Phorm remove this website and replace it with a public apology, especially to those individuals they have ‘named and shamed’. Of course if I was Phorm I’d have had an army of lawyers threatening legal action to remove the site, but my ‘Privacy Pirate’ booty must be running low and I couldn’t afford such luxuries.

UPDATE – As has been mentioned in the comments, it seems that Phorm have now removed the following paragraph from their ‘smear’ site:

“The website managers at 10 Downing Street recognised their mistake in allowing a misleading petition to appear on their site, and have since provided assurances to Phorm that they will not permit this to happen again.”

I can state that on the 28th April I sent an email to the downing street webteam after reading Phorms comments, I was concerned about what was found to be missleading and wanted to know what assurances Phorm had received. I also asked if this meant we could still expect a response to the petition.

Whislt the response I recieved did not make any reference to my requests, they did state that ‘We hope to have a response to you and the other signatories as soon as possible.’

Sometime after this email was sent Phorm removed that statement from their site, I’ve no idea if the email had anything to do with it (probably not), but there is a part of me that would like to imagine an angry 10 downing street webmaster on the phone to Kent.

Further details can be found here for those interested :
https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,1337.0.html