Answer
Phorm’s system is an online recommendation engine that automatically brings you personalised content and personalised advertising based on your interests. To understand how it does this – with the minimum amount of data – you need to know that the system works in two parts: anonymous interest matching; delivering interest based content and advertising.
Our technology works by distinguishing your browser from all others by assigning a random number. The interests reflected by the browsing activity associated with this random number are then matched to predefined or automatically generated categories or “channels”. Advertisers can only create predefined channels that are subject to review and approval by Phorm.
The matching process works by producing a summary of the top 10 keywords that appear on the web page being visited by the browser, which is represented by a random number. The system is configured to exclude from this summery any data that is potentially sensitive or personal in nature. This summary is then compared to the predefined channels and/or used to create a content channel. Only the fact that a match has been made is recorded. The raw data - that is the top 10 keywords - used to make the match and the content of the page from which they were derived is deleted in real time - by the time the page loads. So only the channel, the random number used to distinguish your browser from all the others and a time stamp are retained.
Once a user’s interests are understood, using the process described above, our technology - using a minimal amount of anonymous data - presents content and advertising relevant to you.