Webwise Is Legal

The Phorm technology is legal. It complies with all the appropriate UK laws - and we've consulted a range of experts on this from lawyers to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the Home Office.

However, Phorm's technology represents a big change to the status quo in online advertising, and it's taken a while for people to understand how it works. As a result, there has been some speculation that the Phorm system could be illegal and breach UK law including the Data Protection Act (DPA) and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).

This inaccurate opinion was originally formed by FIPR (the Foundation for Internet Policy Research) without first having the technology explained to them by the company. Furthermore, no other organisation has supported this view and Phorm has spent considerable time meeting with technology experts, MPs and others. In April this year, the UK's privacy watchdog, the ICO said in a statement on its website that:

"We welcome the efforts [Phorm] are making to engage with sceptical technical experts and believe that it is only by allowing their technology to be subject to detailed scrutiny by independent technical experts that they will be able to prove their assertions regarding privacy."

In June 2008, the influential House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee published a report on entitled, "A Surveillance Society?', which covered a range of privacy topics. It included this paragraph:

"... the Information Commissioner took the view that Phorm could operate Webwise and Open Internet Exchange (OIX) in a way which is in compliance with the Data Protection Act and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations but must be sensitive to the concerns of users."