There have been fresh falls today for Aim-listed Phorm as the controversy continues over its targeted online advertising scheme.
Its shares are down 62.5p, or 3.4%, at £17.75 as The Guardian dumped plans to take part in trials of the company's controversial targeted online advertising scheme.
Phorm, formerly 121Media, can track where a user goes and ply them with online adverts more relevant to their profile. Last month BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse signed up to plug the system into their broadband ISPs and run trials over the coming weeks. A host of online content companies have jumped on board, looking to get a better return on their online ad space, including The Financial Times, The Times and The Telegraph.
But Phorm has found itself engulfed in a storm about privacy and a backlash has begun against the service. The Guardian was in exploratory talks with Phorm but in an email to a concerned reader, advertising manager Simon Kilby said "you will be pleased to know that we have signed no agreement with Phorm and have no plans to do so in the future".
"Our decision was in no small part down to the conversations we had internally about how this product sits with the values of our company," he added.
Phorm maintains that it retains no information about the specific sites a web user has visited, nor does it have any information about the actual identity of that user. Its system merely allocates random numbers to internet users when they go online and collects data about the sort of things in which they appear to be interested based on the content of visited sites and the online searches they make.
Advertisers bid for users interested in particular product categories - such as mobile phones or holidays - and when they land on a website plugged into the Phorm ad-exchange, they can be served with a more targeted - and therefore more expensive - advert.
Further up the market, US data is keeping up the pressure. With US durable goods orders taking an unexpected fall according to the latest downbeat data out of the US, Wall Street is on course for more falls today.
In the UK, the FTSE 100 is still mired in the red, down 24 points, or 0.4%, at 5,665.1, with Xstrata still the biggest faller.
