Webwise or Web Wise?

For years, web-wise has come to mean being wise with your interaction with the world wide web. Now the adware and behaviour targeting marketers have combined forces to bring you Webwise. In true marketing speak the ad-men have chosen a brand which means one thing to their customers (advertisers) and another to those web surfers who are providing the products being sold.

What is being sold? Webwise is selling your demographics, your confidential visits to websites, your interests, your purchases, whatever you do and see on the internet is being sold by the Webwise adware marketers and the advertisers are queuing up to purchase as much behaviour profiling as can be collected.

See Privacy – Profilers for more information on how profilers are intruding on your privacy.

Tracking of people, not wild animals

Tracking used to mean the hunter searching for his evening meal. Now tracking is the profile creators' master piece. You are the hunted and you are the evening meal. Everywhere you go on the internet is tracked, followed, noted, analysed: you are profiled, tagged, and presented with advertisements designed to earn the adware merchants their prize.

Behavioural Targeting

Behavioural targeting is the term used when you are followed and then targeted with a personalised series of advertisements closely related to your internet activities and interests. The following is usually performed by sites hosting scripts which update tracking cookies stored on your computer by your browser.

In the case of Webwise, the cookie is still stored on your computer but the script which tracks you is hosted on the ISP's network so that it can track 100% of your surfing.

Webwise hosts a database which records the content of the sites you visit. It builds up a pattern of your interests over time. It knows your behaviour and allows advertisers to target their advertisements to match your interests.

BT Broadband began their trial of Webwise, marketed as BT Webwise: an anti-phishing service that also provides more relevant surfing, on 30 September 2008. The BT Webwise trial of behavioural targeting advertising was due to run for about 4 weeks. During November, more people are being invited to join the trail and have their surfing data made available to the ad-men. The trial ended on 10 December 2008. For more information, read BT Webwise.
 

UPDATE: Phorm claim that BT Webwise will be running live during the first half of 2009.

The petition to the Prime Minister now has over 20k signatures: "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."
petitions.number10.gov.uk/ispphorm/

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