In reply to a post by b4dger:

Don't forget you can always 'opt out':
www.google.com/ads/preferences

Hmm, blank page. But then that's not unexpected, as Kaspersky blocks google.com/ads/*

I haven't seen any ads from google for years, or for that matter, ads in general.

The problem was - As I Understand it - Phorm has its snout buried deep inside the ISP infrastructure and was able to see all of your traffic and had the potential to build an extremely personal and invasive profile of the user (lets leave the arguments about legality out of this - we all know by now big business isn't concerned about that while it has a good supply of paid for politicians in its pocket)

At least with Google etc I can (and have) set my browser to delete all cookies etc when I close - I can run various malware and adware programs across my system, and generally have the chance to manage what is recorded on a longer term basis.

agreed, Phorm was going to take all the traffic between you and your ISP and analyse it, Google can't do that unless you're opting in exclusively to their products and "ecosystem".

The Chromium browser is the open source variant of Google Chrome so what it gets up to is visible if you have the skills and intellect. Phorm would be invisible / unknowable to the user.