Subscribe by EmailWeb inventor says no to online tracking
March 31, 2008 by Mark O'Neill |By Mark O’Neill
In an interview with the BBC, the man who invented the Web says that more needs to be done to stop people and their surfing habits being tracked on the internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke out after a company called Phorm announced plans to track web activity to create personalised adverts.
“I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they’ve figured I’m looking at those books,” he said.
Click here to read the full BBC interview
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Didn’t Tim Berners-Lee invent the World Wide Web, and not the Internet?
I work on behalf of Phorm, here in the UK. We also believe that it is wrong to store Internet users’ personal data.
Our technology is a real turning point in the protection of privacy online - it does not store personally identifiable information, does not store IP addresss and nor does it store browsing histories.
Sir Tim Berners Lee is not familiar with the Phorm system, so he did not know that his example is impossible with our system. There is no match to ‘sensitive’ areas such as medical conditions, no record of what sites users have visited, and no data of any kind is passed by the system to a third party (in his example to insurers).
We look forward to speaking to Tim Berners Lee to explain how our technology is a ground breaking advance in delivering targeted ads while protecting privacy online and consumer choice, as we have with other experts.
You can ask questions about the system and get loads more information by visiting http://blog.webwise.com or http://www.webwise.com or http://www.phorm.com