Targeted ad vendor Phorm has unveiled a new consumer content recommendation service called Webwise Discover, but also revealed that no UK ISPs have yet signed up to the platform.
Webwise Discover will run on the same deep packet inspection (DPI) technology as Phorm’s highly-controversial targeted advertising system and will recommend other content to users in a similar way to an RSS feed.
Phorm believes that this will produce a much more personalised web experience, with content being displayed in an embedded widget that is much more relevant to a user’s interest.
“Gone are the days when a person goes to a homepage and just ‘surfs’,” said Mike Moore, Phorm’s global commercial director. “It’s just tourist traffic now. People arrive via Google or wherever, read the article and leave. This bases related content on what you’ve searched for previously.”
“We’ve got a one-size-fits-all Internet at the moment,” said Phorm CEO Kent Ertugrul. “But people want diversity, they want different things. People don’t always know what they are looking for –they are not always looking for something, sometimes they just want to discover.”
As well as an embedded widget on participating websites, the user will also be able to look at a personalised homepage that will feature a newsfeed based on their searching and reading habits.
The service will be free for publishers to sign-up to and end-users will have the option to opt in. Those websites that do use the service will embed a newsfeed-style widget on their pages that will contain the targeted content.
Websites will have the choice of either displaying content purely from their own site or including content from other websites.
Phorm’s use of DPI has been heavily criticised by some as an invasion of privacy. At an event to mark the launch of Webwise Discover, the company defended its privacy position.
“If the level of privacy we use was the law, how many other companies would follow it?” asked Ertugrul. “We care about privacy perhaps more than most other companies. There is no issue with privacy. The choice is there for consumers.”
Sensitive surfing information – such as medical and adult content – is added to a whitelist of ignored content and will not show up on newsfeeds, SVP of technology Marc Burgess told CBR.
“The consumer has the choice to lower stories in the results, watch this subject, which will promote the stories higher in the rankings, or to kill the subject, which will remove it from results,” Burgess said.
Phorm stresses that its technology does not keep personal information. A random 24-digit number is generated at the start of a session and the user’s IP address is not logged. When a match is made between what the user is looking at and a ‘channel’ of content on the Webwise system, that channel is attached to the random number. Web addresses, searches or browsing history are not stored, the company claims.
Phorm admitted that no UK ISPs have signed up to its targeted advertising platform and Webwise Discover will not be deployed until then. KT, a Korean ISP, is currently trialling the system. Ertugrul refused to be drawn on when the system may be deployed in the UK, although it is believed that it will be live before the end of this year.
The company denied that bad publicity was behind lack of ISPs committing to Phorm’s Webwise technology, although Ertugrul did admit that it was a worry for ISPs. The delay, Ertugrul claimed, was because ISPs wanted to make sure the technology is perfect before rolling it out.
