Phorm is considering paying users to encourage them to take part in its behavioural advertising system.
Last night, at its second townhall-style meeting, Kent Ertugrul the company's chief executive, said Phorm might try subsidising broadband or offer funds to charities to encourage surfers to choose to use Phorm.
Phorm is a behavioral advertising system which uses deep-packet inspection technology to decide which adverts to surface to surfers. Most display ads are based on the content of the page.
While the Guardian cancelled plans to work with Phorm, Virgin and Talk Talk have also signed onto the scheme, but only BT has run a trial, which ended in December. Aside from BT, Ertugrul said Phorm was also in talks with many other large internet service providers (ISPs). Ertugrul would not discuss the results of the BT trial, or say how many people chose to opt out of the system, which is called WebWise.
Paying users could be one way to ensure enough people choose to use the system, if targeted advertising isn't enough to draw them in.
One controversy surrounding the Phorm system is whether people will be required to opt out of it by their ISPs, or if it will use an opt in model. But Ertugrul said such decisions were up to ISPs and not even that important, so long as consumers are clearly told about the choice they were making.
"We believe in choice," he said. "Consumers should be given a clear, consistent, open and transparent choice," to use the platform or not.
Ertugrul and his fellow panelists slammed other advertising systems namely Google's for not offering a choice about whether or not users will accept cookies to track them across multiple sites. He said Phorm's deep-packet inspection was not the issue, but how privacy and choices are presented. "That's fundamentally what privacy is about, it's about practice, not technology."
Despite stressing the importance of receiving public feedback, Ertugrul spent some time expressing frustration at still having to answer questions about privacy in Phorm. After mocking a poorly-attended protest at BT, Ertugrul accused some of creating a "circle of noise" about Phorm and willfully misunderstanding the system.
"Some people believe people shouldn't be given a choice They've spent the past year trying to turn this into something evil," he said.
"Consumers should be allowed to choose and only consumers should be allowed to choose," he later added.
The Open Rights Group earlier this month sent a letter to big web firms such as Google, asking them to boycott Phorm.
The panelists claimed Phorm could solve a variety of web-related troubles just by offering more relevant advertising. They claimed it could help save newspapers and help pay for next-generation networks.
Non-executive board member Kip Meek head of the Broadband Stakeholders Group and former Ofcom head stressed that Phorm could help encourage ISPs to invest in new networks, which they have little financial motivation to do at the moment because of flat monthly charges. "Phorm provides at least part of the answer."
"[Phorm] can contribute significant single digit percentage to profitability of an ISP," Meek claimed.
