Answer to Digital Media’s Woes? Very Contentious and Unloved Spyware…

A report in the FT’s Companies & Markets today flags up the fact that even the digitopia is to suffer in this coming crisis. UK research group Enders reports that online display advertising sales are “at best flat” for the third quarter. Rates have fallen by a third since last year.

So what’s everyone going to do then? Well, tucked in the back of the article it mentions that a wazzo company called Phorm is going to sail in and save the industry, with something called ‘behavioural targeting’. Even the most rustic dig through the blogosphere uncovers that Phorm is basically a spyware seller: their software monitors your browsing habits, collects data and sells it on to advertisers (or as they euphemise: “Phorm, Inc. is striving to create a new, more responsive, intuitive kind of internet experience” etc. etc.) To watch the company assasinated point by point, see here.

Phorm are a media partner of the FT, (which they do mention in the article, thankfully; the Guardian has broken its partnership with the company), but are also so widely scorned on the net that someone has been bidding on the adwords for Phorm – type the company name into Google and the site www.donottrustwebwise.org pops up (Webwise is the controversial product Phorm is using in partnership with BT Internet and Carphone Warehouse to monitor user activities).

Last week we talked about Slavoj Žižek’s thought provoking little rant in the LRB about the possible erosion of civil liberties that may occur in the coming crisis. His argument: economic revival will be given a patriotic slant, and all manner of dodgy practices previously thought unconscionable will be ushered in on the coattails of this sentiment.

So watch this space basically. Whatever you feel about mainstream spyware (the FT claims that one third of users consider it an abuse of privacy, yet cast that as a positive?), there’s going to be more and more talk about how we need it to save the digital media etc etc., now that the information revolution has run aground and all those double digit growth figures are looking shaky.

I mean, just look at what Mark Zuckerberg’s been saying lately: apparently we all like ’sharing’, and this whole privacy debate is really just a smoke screen to stop us from doing that? Hmmm…

Posted by Becky North in Creative Economy | October 20, 2008 9:40AM |