» When Good(?) PR Goes Bad

Either something is in the tap-water-from-a-spring PR drones in the UK are drinking, or an intrinsically abject failure of intelligence is coming to the fore, but they seem to be losing their “magic” touch of late.

“We were adware, not spyware, honest” Phorm was caught with its hand in the cookie jar (no pun intended) recently, making some rather intriguing “clarifications” of the Wikipedia entry about the company.

Having read the differences between the two versions (pre and post PR drone assault), I can understand why Phorm might want to “clarify” their entry.  Parts of the entry they “clarified” include

regarding a targeted advertisement service which would monitor browsing habits and serve relevant advertisements to the end user.

which became

regarding a targeted advertisement service called Webwise. Webwise creates an anonymous data digest of a users browsing behaviour and serves relevant advertisements to the end user

There’s also

“As you browse, we’re able to categorize all of your Internet actions,” said Virasb Vahidi, the chief operating officer of Phorm. “We actually can see the entire Internet.”

(Originally quoted from a recent NYTimes article about Phorm, added to the Wikipedia entry)

which was converted to … well, OK, it was deleted, not converted.  I guess not even PR drones could make that less ominous.

This one is cute:

Users will be able to [[opt-out]] of Phorm’s service. However, according to a spokesman for Phorm, the way the opt-out works means the contents of the websites you visit will still be [[Mirror (computing)|mirrored]] to its system.<ref>

became

Users will be able to [[opt-out]] of Phorm’s service by blocking cookies from the domain, www.webwise.com or switching the system off

Aha!  So, if you want to block Phorm, all you have to do is turn your computer off - which also is the tried and tested way of avoiding other malware like viruses, trojans, adware, and spam emails.  So, to avoid being monitored, all you have to do is … not use your computer?

I suppose the added bonus from the perspective of the ISPs is that you’re also not going to be using their bandwidth at the same time.

To cap it all off, the PR drones also seem to have decided that any mention of the secret trials BT ran (then denied, then admitted to a year later after Phorm became “public knowledge”) should probably be deleted from the Wikipedia entry as well.

What I don’t understand is, just how did they expect to actually get away with this blatant revisionism?  Tracking of Wikipedia edits is nothing new, they must have known that, given the public interest in Phorm, someone would notice.

Thankfully, someone did, and the original entry was reinstated.

The other oopsie of note is the PR drones from O2, a mobile phone provider in the UK, calling a reporter from The Register.

Unfortunately, they weren’t done with their little conference call on what they were going to tell the reporter before they called.  Cue “Oh really?” moment for the reporter.

The discussion, between two in-house PRs, centred around how to paint anyone wanting more bandwidth than the 128Kb/sec O2 deems suitable as clearly being “a bunch of techie nerds”.

Of course, these are communications professionals, so they wisely discuss how to avoid using that term, or as they put it, find “…a good way of saying they’re all geeks”.

Yes, O2’s comms team was keen to avoid anything that might encourage subscribers to leave the telco. Indeed, in their eyes, anyone threatening to leave the network is clearly a “muppet”, with the PRs asking each other incredulously “…and join who? 3?”

So you see, it isn’t just Presidents talking to poodles … erm, Prime Ministers that can forget who might be listening.

Makes me yearn for the good old days of Saatchi and Saatchi.  Now there were some fine PR drones - nowadays, it seems the emphasis is on “drone”

Tags: AdWare, BT, Carphone Warehouse, O2, Phorm, Virgin Media, WebWise