Phooling Phorm

When we looked at how to avoid Phorm phishing our digital footprint, we thought the obvious way was to generate "white noise" - ie a whole lot of spurious behaviour that masked our real behaviour - we looked at using the Dogpile live search feed to throw back into the system for example.

(FYI - Dogpile is my default search engine, has been for 8 years - it searches all the others and You Know Who knows less about me that way)

It looks like others have had a similar idea, notes El Reg:

Coding activists have developed an application designed to confound Phorm's controversial behaviour-tracking software by simulating random web-browsing.

The folks behind AntiPhormLite says this means actual browsing habits are buried in noise. The app, which is available free of charge, is designed to poison the anonymised click stream Phorm collects with meaningless junk, thereby (at least in theory) undermining its business model.

Like with killing popups, the Web will find a way - I expect it to be automatic in browsers within months. How that will impact Phorm's "interesting" public valuation I don't know, but I guess we will find out in fairly short order......