This week has seen both

amazon [BBC News]  and Wiki [Wiki]

request an opt out from Phorm/Webwise scanning system.

Phorm/Webwise currently only allows websites to opt-out by email [BT Webwise].

Its a real shame they are not following the robots.txt file correctly by their name instead of checking generic search robot exclusions.

A simple (an example – not valid):

Disallow: /
User-agent: phorm
User-agent: webwise

would then allow websites to easily stop the phorm/webwise scanners.

Hopefully with time, this ability will be added by the people at phorm.