You'll recall that companies with behavioral advertising ambitions like Phorm and NebuAD watched those ambitions go up in smoke here in the States and in the UK, after the companies struck covert deals with ISPs that not only didn't inform users their activity was being tracked and sold -- but didn't provide working opt-out tools, either.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Phorm is back pitching their deep packet inspection technology alongside a company named Kindsight. Both companies are using deep packet inspection technology, and are currently testing their services with several major ISPs:

Kindsight and Phorm say they protect people's privacy with steps that include obtaining their consent. They also say they don't use the full power of the technology, and refrain from reading email and analyzing sensitive online activities. Use of deep packet inspection this way would nonetheless give advertisers the ability to show ads to people based on extremely detailed profiles of their Internet activity. To persuade Internet users to opt in to be profiled, Kindsight will offer a free security service, while Phorm promises to provide customized web content such as news articles tailored to users' interests. Both would share ad revenue with the ISPs.

Obviously deep packet inspection technology by itself isn't "evil," and has a variety of legitimate uses. The problem is that despite all of the political grandstanding last year over behavioral advertising, there still aren't any laws on the books protecting consumers from abuse of the technology. In other words, DPI is only as problematic as the companies using it, and Phorm's track record isn't very good. You'll recall that instead of addressing criticism of the one-time-rootkit maker's business practices (like tracking British Telecom customer surfing without telling anybody), Phorm instead tried to smear critics.

As for Kindsight, judging from Kindsight's website, they've taken a page out of the Phorm playbook and are pitching their services as a way to protect from identity theft. Phorm used to sell their solution as anti-phishing protection, but now claims they'll simply offer "news articles tailored to users' interests." Of course tailored news or security services aren't the real goal, and simply act as a way to sell users on the idea of opting in to behavioral advertising. The real goal is to track almost everything users do online, then monetize that data in any way possible.
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Tags: british telecom, consumer protections, inspection technology, packet inspection, wall street journal

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