CenturyTel joins Charter in data pimping freeze

Huh.

I'm impressed, not. It's bound to be accepted because of the money to be made. Now that's what really matters. Or so I am told.

Tracking == Bad

Why bother? Your ads are going to be adblocked. All your work matching up the perfect bit of offensive crud with my profile will be wasted.

Were your useless "service" fully anonymised, I wouldn't care. However, I don't think it is. You are building a list of very personal information linked to a unique ID. Just because that ID is not my name, does not make that acceptable.

Until advertisers stop using infuriating advertising tactics that look more like browser ambush (flash rollons or coverups, popups, popunders, anything opening in a new window) or attempts to melt my eyeballs (flashing, blinking neon, YOU ARE THE 1,000,000th VISITOR type rubbish) people like me are increasingly going to resort to blocking all flash and javascript and will filter images by using blacklists of known spa^H^H^Hadvertisering servers. Targetting adverts will not help - I don't care what the advert is for, if it is annoying simply by existing.

More and more I'm thinking that there isn't so much of a divide between spammers and 'mainstream ' marketing. Maybe we need a Phormhaus to block all sites connected to networks that distribute malware, tracking software / cookies, or produce in-your-face adverts?

I'm all for it

Lets face it - it keeps the price of the interweb down for the rest of us - I'd even let em have opt-out if the opt-out was obvious, easy and any-time activated.

Of course the idiots at Phorm etc could have saved themselves a load of aggro by pushing it as a loyalty/discount scheme - I bet Nectar could get millions of people giving away their nettracks almost overnight - 'sign here for automatic discounts'.

how to defeat the Phorm/NebuAd based business plan

I'm assuming here that ISPs will get paid on a per-click basis so all you need to do is not click on ads, if they are not making money from it then it will not be economical to maintain the servers running the crapware.

Anyone remember LibertySurf? where you paid a tenner for 4 hours free dial-up access a month in return for them displaying a bar at the top of your screen with clickable links to online stores such as Kelkoo running across?

That was obviously not profitable as they went out of business and subscribers were borged by Tiscali if I remember correctly.

I got £50 worth of Internet access out of the them before I got the e-mail saying they were going to turn out the lights.

Posted anymously in case there are still any disgruntled Libertysurf employees who want to demand my details from El Reg.