Targetted ads - not Phorm...?

TBB users will be well aware of recent(ish) threads on the pros and cons of Phorm which says it "Delivers targeted advertisements to end users based on their web browsing history.".

I'm currently looking for a new mobile phone (HTC Wildfire) - after visiting numerous sites and clicking many Google Adwords etc. I notice that when I visit TBB all their Google ads are for both the product and sites I've just been looking at!

So if my provider doesn't use Phorm isn't this practice already in use by other means?

I've just cleared my cookies out and TBB ads have returned to Broadband related ones. Currently seeing one from Adobe - but no HTC Wildfire stuff.

Sites like google that manage ads for many sites have been doing this for ages, it is all done by cookies and has been like that for years, just they are getting better at the targetting these days

This has been discussed a couple of times I think in TTTS. I forget the explanation, but it isn't ISP-related. Possibly it was something to do with the google-induced delay when we read these forums and cookies from google on your machine? Also Google Adsense which is probaly what is doing it.

A related thread.
This one looks to be a bit more useful on a quick scan.

That's what I guessed - so when you look at Phorm's tag line it's not much different to what happens anyway.

NB. Also thanks RobertoS for your reply

It's not a problem for me (I *really* love Google) I'm just interested in how all this hangs together. It makes sense(<did you see what I did there!) really and could help me, I might see a good deal for something I'm looking for rather than just ignoring pointless 'non-targeted' ads.

Edited by b4dger (Sun 06-Feb-11 17:56:06)

Ironically the vast majority of banners for me are Virgin media TV & broadband ones - an option which is unavailable to me (& unlikely ever to be available here)! We also get mail drops most weeks from them too!!

Phorm saw all your traffic, Google will only see sites that are using google adsense scheme

No, nothing to do with TBB of course.

Plenty of sites use tracking cookies and 'beacons' but you might not expect to come across this sort of thing when using SSL i.e secure sites,
but logging in securely to AOL webmail via a direct link, not AOL home page, i was just asked to approve/reject a cert for 'sb scorecardresearch.com'
The only reason i knew this was happening was because recently i looked closely at all the root certs in my browser store and changed a number of them to 'Warn me before using this certificate'

In this case scorecardresearch were using AddTrust External CA Root

they also use a root for UTN-USERFirst-Hardware

it's probably worth changing their status to 'Warn me before using this certificate'

http://www.scorecardresearch.com/Priv.html