They were never prosecuted because the law doesn't clearly say that mere interception by a computer without disclosing it to a human is a crime and Phorm therefore had a good chance of getting away with it. That's the difficulty of trying to apply a law made for wiretapping to the Internet.
As for the surrounding "campaign", what a magnificent victory for privacy, eh? Yes, we can certainly sleep safer in our beds knowing that there's not massive instrusive profiling of Internet users going on can't we? Pah, waste of time driven by self-serving idiots.
But the cookie faking that Phorm proposed? Nasty, all kinds of potential nastiness in that...
Overall good riddance.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
