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In my opinion, IANAL but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express.

Not only is Aluria certifying WhenU with its "Spyware SAFE Certification Program", but it is also providing WhenU with a spyware removal tool too. This helps give WhenU an "air of respectability."

What I don't get, though is why anyone would consciously agree to have adware installed on their desktop that would examine keywords, URLs and search terms. Even if no data is collected and all is kept encrypted, why would anyone want ads popping up while they are working (or whatever) on their computer?

Aluria didn't post any press releases about this. All they have is the Spyware SAFE page for WhenU, which they must have now that they've certified it. I still think they shot themselves in the foot, just by certifying WhenU, but they certainly didn't go out of their way to publicize it.

Aluria didn't post any press releases about this. All they have is the Spyware SAFE page for WhenU, which they must have now that they've certified it. I still think they shot themselves in the foot, just by certifying WhenU, but they certainly didn't go out of their way to publicize it.

This post may be understood as flamebait by those who do barely try to see things from my point of view, but I can brace myself up against that. The issue is, I do not really see where some peoples' complaints against major advertising companies lie, as it seems apparent to me that the softwares' privacy policy has always been available to the end-user. Out of curiosity, I visited WhenU's site to verify whether or not there was truely a case of non-consent on the behalf of the user, and of breach of the user's privacy. WhenU's privacy policy is freely available on their site, and for the lazy among you, these are basically the most important paragraphs:

By downloading the SaveNow software, you give permission to WhenU.com to display relevant contextual information and offers. The SaveNow software selects which ads and offers to display to individual users based on several factors, including: URLs associated with Web pages visited by the user, search terms typed by the user into search engines, HTML content of the Web pages viewed by the user and the local zip code of the user.

The software protects users' privacy by uploading a database of content in small chunks to individual desktops, and then determining on the desktop whether to retrieve information from WhenU.com or third-party servers. To protect user privacy, the same database of content is sent to all desktops. Decisions regarding which ads to retrieve to an individual desktop are all processed on the user's desktop - and isolated from WhenU.com servers. User privacy is also protected in the following manner:

1) Personally-identifiable information is NOT required in order to use the software and WhenU.com does NOT know the identity of individual users of the software
2) As the user surfs the Internet, URLS visited by the user (i.e. the user's "clickstream data") are NOT transmitted to WhenU.com or any third party server
3) WhenU.com does NOT assemble personally-identifiable browsing profiles of users
4) WhenU.com does NOT assemble anonymous machine-identifiable browsing profiles of individual users
5) WhenU.com does NOT track which ads and offers are seen or clicked on by individual machines - analysis and tracking is done in the aggregate.

So, according to this privacy statement the user consents to installing the software and subsequently to have the said software make use of the user's bandwidth to send anonymous usage statistics to WhenU.com and download advertising banners corresponding to the profile built with the anonymous information. I hastedly repeated the small research for Claria software (formerly GATOR software) and the results are pretty much identical -- the user consents to installing the program and have it use bandwidth to send anonymous information to Internet servers. So the major desktop advertising comapnies are sadly pretty much right when the affirm that the user is consenting to their software using their computer to perform various tasks and activities. Now the question which is preponderant in my mind is: what am I doing wrong here? There must be a further reason for everyone complaining about a breach of privacy, further than the statements in the privacy policies then -- but if the information in the privacy policies is invalid, doesn't that make the activity of these companies illegal?

This post may be understood as flamebait by those who do barely try to see things from my point of view, but I can brace myself up against that. The issue is, I do not really see where some peoples' complaints against major advertising companies lie, as it seems apparent to me that the softwares' privacy policy has always been available to the end-user. Out of curiosity, I visited WhenU's site to verify whether or not there was truely a case of non-consent on the behalf of the user, and of breach of the user's privacy. WhenU's privacy policy is freely available on their site, and for the lazy among you, these are basically the most important paragraphs:

By downloading the SaveNow software, you give permission to WhenU.com to display relevant contextual information and offers. The SaveNow software selects which ads and offers to display to individual users based on several factors, including: URLs associated with Web pages visited by the user, search terms typed by the user into search engines, HTML content of the Web pages viewed by the user and the local zip code of the user.

The software protects users' privacy by uploading a database of content in small chunks to individual desktops, and then determining on the desktop whether to retrieve information from WhenU.com or third-party servers. To protect user privacy, the same database of content is sent to all desktops. Decisions regarding which ads to retrieve to an individual desktop are all processed on the user's desktop - and isolated from WhenU.com servers. User privacy is also protected in the following manner:

1) Personally-identifiable information is NOT required in order to use the software and WhenU.com does NOT know the identity of individual users of the software
2) As the user surfs the Internet, URLS visited by the user (i.e. the user's "clickstream data") are NOT transmitted to WhenU.com or any third party server
3) WhenU.com does NOT assemble personally-identifiable browsing profiles of users
4) WhenU.com does NOT assemble anonymous machine-identifiable browsing profiles of individual users
5) WhenU.com does NOT track which ads and offers are seen or clicked on by individual machines - analysis and tracking is done in the aggregate.

So, according to this privacy statement the user consents to installing the software and subsequently to have the said software make use of the user's bandwidth to send anonymous usage statistics to WhenU.com and download advertising banners corresponding to the profile built with the anonymous information. I hastedly repeated the small research for Claria software (formerly GATOR software) and the results are pretty much identical -- the user consents to installing the program and have it use bandwidth to send anonymous information to Internet servers. So the major desktop advertising comapnies are sadly pretty much right when the affirm that the user is consenting to their software using their computer to perform various tasks and activities. Now the question which is preponderant in my mind is: what am I doing wrong here? There must be a further reason for everyone complaining about a breach of privacy, further than the statements in the privacy policies then -- but if the information in the privacy policies is invalid, doesn't that make the activity of these companies illegal?

Gotta love their press releases...

Consumer desktop freedom... Nice...

If WhenU.com is unhappy about Utah law, I can only imagine how they will respond if either the proposed Software Principles Yielding Better Levels of Consumer Knowledge (SPYBLOCK) Act or the Controlling Invasive and Unauthorized Software Act is passed and signed into law.

These bills have been covered by:

PC World

InfoWorld

ComputerWorld, and

TechNewsWorld

I was trying to see WhenU's side of the story by looking at . Unfortunately, when I tried to go there, my company popped up its standard "We can't let you see this web site" message. The blocking category? "Spyware". Apparenly the State of Utah is not the only group that classifies WhenU that way.

If I'm clear about what my software does, and this site was, then I ought to be free to distribute it and block popups or anything else I want. If this behavior is illegal, then popup blocking software ought to be illegal, too.

If I'm clear about what my software does, and this site was, then I ought to be free to distribute it and block popups or anything else I want. If this behavior is illegal, then popup blocking software ought to be illegal, too.

The lost of privacy was bad enough, but SaveNow seems to work by hooking into Windows Explorer and intercepting a great many application events. For a long time I blammed the resulting performance hit on a combination of my own excessive system tweaking, buggy Explorer plugins, and MS software bloat. It wasn't until Explorer froze up totally that I realized some background process was interfering with it, and found the culprit by process of elimination.

It strikes me that this is not very different from activities that have gotten people sued or even arrested. It's all there -- unauthorized access, theft of services, malicious action. Perhaps it's time we gave Mister Ashcroft a call!