The use of Phorm has been ruled out by Orange

An announcement has been made by Orange that its broadband service will now not be using the Phorm advertising technology, which has raised a lot of controversy recently.

Senior vice-president of Orange’s online advertising division, Paul-François Fournier said during a recent Financial Times interview that the Phorm service was something that Orange would not be signing up to use

The aims of the Phorm system is to look at an individual’s website access and from this provide them with advertising that suits their needs. However, due to the highly invasive nature of the system Phorm has met with heavy criticism from campaigners for privacy.

An Orange spokesman said “As a network provider, we are very close to our customers and as a result are trusted with their personal information. We take this responsibility extremely seriously and it is our policy to be clear and transparent on how this data can be used, without compromising privacy.”

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The Phorm advertising system is expected to be undergoing trial at both TalkTalk and Virgin Media quite soon and trials are already underway with BT. It is, however, unclear whether BT will take up the system once trials are over but it is likely that there will be those that won’t be happy if it does.

A spokesman for Phorm said “We never comment about specific discussions with any ISP, but based on conversations we’ve had with many ISPs both in the UK and internationally, we are very confident that in due course this technology is something that most of them will chose to adopt, There has been a growing acceptance that Phorm has employed leading privacy standards which are significantly higher that those that currently prevail in this industry. The simple fact is that our system has been built from the ground up with privacy at its core.”