Webwise is a feature currently offered to advertisers by a handful of UK mass-market ISPs – BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk – between them accounting for around 70% of the UK broadband market.

Phorm says its system helps protect surfers from fraudulent websites, but, given that at the same time it replaces generic online ads with those directly relevant to a viewer's interests, some web users, including Berners-Lee, the founder of the World-Wide Web have deeper concerns.
In an interview with BBC News, Berners-Lee said that consumers need to be protected against systems which track activity on the internet, saying "I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer, that it's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured out [why] I'm looking at those books."

According to Phorm, however, webwise does NOT record the IP address of anyone visiting a site. Instead it allocates a random number. This number is then used to serve relevant ads whenever you subsequently visit sites that subscirbe to the Phorm service. Once you visit another side that subscribes to Phorm, the original random number is deleted, so no on-going record of where you have been is maintained.

Much as we hate to take issue with someone as august as Berners-Lee, we think his objection is slightly over-done in this case. However, we'd recommend anyone to specifically add www.webwise.net to their blocked cookie list if they have any further concern.

We welcome Webwise because it, at least on the surface, seems to be a genuine attempt to reconcile the genuine privacy issues of consumers on the web with the increasing desire of advertisers to target based on behaviour.