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Hiding Your Choices And Saying You Made Them
An anonymous reader writes "Lawmeme's Paul Szynol describes how during installation RealPlayer hides checkboxes that elect that the user receives spam, making it look like the user chose to make the selections when in fact he probably just didn't see the options. "This is essentially a cheap and dirty marketing tactic which creates an illusion of informed acceptance by the user where no such acceptance really exists." Other people have posted similar examples from other applications. Is this illegal, or just annoying?"
It does seem rather ironic that nowadays my firewall blocks more traffic coming from my own machine then from hackers on the net.
There several good reasons depending on why they did this.
If they are claiming (to advertisers or users) that the spam is opt-in, then their practice is deceptive/fraud (false advertising, etc)
If they try to claim that the users 'consent' relieves them from fines where spam is illegal, they have comitted a different sort of fraud that is approximatly the same as hiding a real contract behind a reasonable one that covers all but the signature line. (a long time favorite of moustache twisting villains in old movies, I might add). At the very least, it's as bad as using print so small that even a person w/ perfect vision needs a magnifier (in the case of disclaimers, and the health warning on cigarettes, that practice is specifically illegal).
I think it is fairly clear that REal intended for the selections to be deceptive. Deception of that nature is at least unethical, and in some cases, illegal.