e-ignite

e-ignite has now opted out of Phorm / Webwise tracking so visitors to the site will have their privacy protected.  Please see the open letter below:

Email sent to: website-exclusion@webwise.com

Date / Time: 28 April 2009 / 7.18pm UK Time

Subject: Website Exclusion Request: e-ignite.co.uk [An open letter]

Content: To whom it may concern,

I own and operate the domain e-ignite.co.uk and all subdomains under this domain.  I wish this website and all its subdomains to be excluded from Webwise / Phorm for the benefit of the privacy of all visitors to the site.  I fundamentally disagree with the Webwise tracking practices and I also disagree with the policy that website owners have to specifically opt-out via email – a Webwise / Phorm specific entry in robots.txt should be respected.

Regards.

If you own your owh website, the Phorm / Webwise system will automatically track your visitors and serve up behavioural advertising on the basis of the content on sites the users have been browsing.  Unlike reputable search engines and other robots (such as Google, Yahoo etc), Phorm / Webwise does not respect a command to specifically disallow the bot from indexing your pages unless you disallow all bots (including search engines etc – basically, this would remove your website from the likes of Google).  This is unacceptable and is extremely poor practice, and you therefore have to send an email to the above email address to de-list your site from the Phorm / Webwise tracking.  I have included this open letter to the makers of Phorm / Webwise in an effort to reassure visitors that e-ignite does in fact take privacy seriously and to make it publicly clear that we do not agree with the practices of tracking web users activity.