Industry leading privacy

Phorm’s personalisation technology has been built with privacy in mind.

Switching it on or off will be a clear choice and you’ll be able to change your mind at any time.

It will never know who users are. They’ll be anonymous right from the moment they choose to take part and no personal data, no browsing histories or IP addresses will be stored.

The system has been designed to work only with public web pages and will ignore webmail and cannot read secure sites indicated by the closed padlock symbol. Furthermore, in understanding users interests, the technology looks at the most frequently occurring keywords on the page being visited, but not before excluding potentially personal information. The type of data ignored ranges from information typed into form fields, to names, to email addresses, to numbers longer than three digits.

Sensitive topics, such as adult, medical conditions or alcohol, for example, are also ignored by the system.

All this makes our privacy friendly technology unique. It’s unlike most online services, which in some cases store personal data for a minimum of at least nine months before it is anonymised. And in our case, anonymisation cannot be reversed to reveal any personal information because no personal information is kept in the first instance.