Firephorm – the anti-phorm Firefox extension

Martin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:14:41 +0000

We have covered Phorm before at Ghacks. It is a very scary cooperation between several Internet Service Providers and advertising companies. The Internet Service Providers install tracking cookies on user systems and create a unique profile for each user which is then used by the advertising agencies to display targeted advertisement to the user. Especially British Internet Service Providers seem inclined to make use of Phorm to earn an extra bug. The best way of dealing with such companies would be change to another phorm-free provider as soon as possible. This however is not always possible. That’s when anti-phorm tools come into play. They are also great for the time it takes to transfer the account from one provider to another.

Why is Phorm so dangerous? The tracking is definitely a privacy issue. The user cannot opt out of the tracking and data like search queries and visited websites are stored and analyzed. Since British companies are world renowned for data safety it is only a matter of time before data leaks user profiles.

Firephorm is a Firefox extension that is forging the cookies placed on the system to make the tracking system useless. It provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user.

The Firefox extension modifies http requests and response headers and can also warn the user if a webpage request was redirected via Phorm’s webwise.net.

Tags: advertisement, firefox phorm, firephorm, internet service provider, phorm, privacy, tracking, tracking cookies

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Firephorm – the anti-phorm Firefox extension

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