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Nationwide Class Action Filed Against DoubleClick
Stanley Ference continues: "The class action complaint alleges that DoubleClick deceptively and fraudulently commandeered millions of Internet users to the commercial websites of DoubleClick's customers through dissemination of tens-of-millions of fraudulent Internet advertising banners that impersonated computer system messages. The Complaint states that through use of such Fake User Interface ("FUI") dialogs that fraudulently represented themselves as computer system error messages, DoubleClick tricked millions of Internet users into interrupting the work they were performing to respond to the fraudulent system message, only to unexpectedly find both computer and computer user thus hijacked to commercial websites of DoubleClick's customers.
Additional information about this lawsuit, including an illustration of the advertising banners that are the subject of this lawsuit, may be found at ferencelaw.com/doubleclick."
Here's a link to the press release (PDF) announcing the filing of this lawsuit.
False advertizing is false advertizing, and half of all popup ads are unequivocably that.
Repeal the DMCA!
My mother was sitting there clicking one of those ads for about 15 minutes and closing out the new window every time it opened. The reason? It said "Click OK to close this window." I was commandeered into showing her that you have to click the little X button to close out the window. Maybe I'm biased, but I'm glad they're finally getting sued for taking advantage of the people that are, shall we say, less-than-knowledgeable internet users.
"And when I see signs when I'm on the freeway saying there are once in a lifetime deals at a car dealer I get off the road right away..."
See, at least those can be somewhat true from the right POV (the dealer will only have a sale exactly like that just once, etc. etc.). What the suit is complaining about is something akin to setting up orange "Road Closed Ahead - Use Detour" signs along the road that trick drivers into driving right into the car lot.
..Only because I want them to change their advertising practices to get away from the egregious misleading practices that most of the vendors they push ads for concoct.. ..I don't care if you want to pop an ad up about performance parts for my car if I happen to be on a tuner website looking at mods for my car. What I don't agree with is all those 'your connection is not optimized' crapola that they flash at me when I'm say, reading tomshardware. That stuff IS blatantly misleading and would be equivalent in the real world to setting up a billboard on the side of the BQE and stating something to the effect of 'If you're driving a chevy, your brakes are wearing down at an alarming rate! Pull over and call Bob's car parts NOW, or you will DIE, mouthbreather!!'...
..I hope they smack those bastards, I really really do..
That kind of advertising is a classic ploy praying on people who are ignorant of the real working of the technology being pushed and used.
Are your brakes less than optimal? Well sure, if you've taken the car out of the driveway in the last six months, hell even if its been driven off the truck that brought them to the dealership.. That does NOT mean that my brakes are going to fail that very moment and that by not following the ad to the product I'm in some sort of imminent doom..
From the law firm's website:
WHO IS A MEMBER OF THE PROPOSED CLASS?
The class action Complaint was brought on behalf of all persons residing in the United States who have, while operating a computer, encountered an advertising banner like the one illustrated on this website.
If you saw the ads, you're a member of the class. You don't have to have clicked on any of them.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
These goons (the DoubleClick advertisors) deliberately designed their items to trick people. They left "presents" behind for admins like myself to clean up after. The only reason they were able to do that was by having a large, ubiquitous, and utterly unscrupulous delivery service plastering adds in useful sites everywhere.
Frankly, this shit is a virus by any other standard. I just wish MicroShaft was included in it for designing an web browser that allowed people to transparently install this shit.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I don't want to start a flame war, but I've been using Mozilla for a year (since 1.0), and with its popup blocking feature, I haven't seen one of those god-awful windows EVER.
Double-click wasted a lot of my time back when I was using IE. We all thought they would go bankrupt back in 2001, but they just kept surviving. Maybe this will break the bank and smother the dark side forever.
More than enough BS
The average user in this class will be lucky if they get 50 cents. The lawyers who filed it will probably net a few million. The only "user" (probably the lawyer's brother in law) who will get anything (perhaps few thousand bucks) is the guy with his name at the top of the complaint. At best, it's right-off for Double-Click, an annuity for a few lawyers (who will spend it on expensive trinkets), and a miniscule amount of job security for copier and paper mill workers. That's the way we keep cash sloshing around in our economy. It's what technologically advanced societies do to avoid boredom and the Third World has to look forward to. It's only a game.
Have you ever actually read the FACTS of that McDonald's coffee spill case? Had you done so, you wouldn't be popping off as though it were a frivolous case.
McDonald's had received 700 such complaints, and documented full knowledge and extent of the hazard. Many of the claims were settled for up to $500K.
McDonald's kept their coffee heated to 180-190 degrees (boiling is not far off) to maintain taste. Most other places (and probably your own coffee maker) serve coffee at about 135-140 degrees. Big difference. McDonald's own quality assurance person testified that burns occur from foods heated to temperatures above 140 degrees, so they knew of the potential for injury.
A simple google search will turn up quite a bit of discussion on this case. For example, One such summary.
Repeatedly trotting out this case as an example of frivolous lawsuits is a continuing myth that corporations are happy to encourage.
DoubleClick's entire business model is based on gross invasion of what little privacy we have left, intensive data mining, consumer profiling, spamming, etc., ad nauseum. Far as I'm concerned, they deserve this!
Some examples: In 1998, the spammed Princeton U, trolling for job candidates. In June of 2003, DoubleClick announced their own so-called anti-spam initiatives that, according to the article, will "focus on finding out how consumers identify spam, to give marketers a better idea of how they can avoid being unfairly singled out as spammers." (For the record, spam is any E-mail received that tries to sell you something or, in the case of political spam, get your vote, and that you did not ask for).
Want more? No problem. In 2001, DoubleClick two unnamed E-mail marketing companies to, according to a quote in the article from CBS's Market Watch, "increase its junk e-mail capabilities."
Still not convinced? How about this thread over at the Firewall-Wizards site from 1999?
In summary, it looks like DoubleClick has long attempted to redefine spam as "That Which We Do Not Do." It also appears that their ethics are questionable at best, especially in light of those FUI banners on web pages.
DoubleClick, if you're reading this... You brought it on yourselves, and you have nothing but your own shady practices to blame. May you go down in a nice, pretty set of multicolored flames, and may the ashes be used as space filler for the next five Great Deconstructed Architectural Makeovers in FunFun Town. Nick Danger could probably use a new office...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Actually, some countries have laws that prohibit using words like "best" in product promotions, since it is most commonly a subjective feeling.
Example: The phrase "The most comfortable bed you can buy", would never appear in Swedish advertisements. There is however one company that promotes with "Try to find a better bed". Carlsberg has "Probably the best beer in the world", etc, etc.
But, sure. They're all gonna have some special buzzword/whatever to promote their product, despite the fact that the product and price with correct placement is a real killer when it comes to selling stuff (noone wants to call you or enter your shop to get to know the price of the product).
We also know for a fact that we pay for commercials. A company I sometimes work for is only having ads in really small (free) local papers and specialized magazines, because they need the money to get going.
There aren't very many legitimate forms of adverts. There are however deceptive, convincing and informative (in order of dislike, most hated comes first) forms of them.
Thank you for reading at -1, Karma-whore.
Precedent may have already lost them their case:
? tid=123&tid=99
:).
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/05/28/173228.shtml
Will they, as opposed to the purple monkey people, have to pay damages though? One could argue that knowing the outcome of the above case meant they KNEW that what they were doing was illegal.
Either way I dont care, doubleclick is dev/nulled out in my hosts file
A casino in Las Vegas got in trouble over its billboards that resembled traffic signs...it turns out that there are laws (in Nevada and California, at least) that "prohibit the placement of signs that imitate official highway signs."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
It would be more like this:
"Warning: Your wheels are not properly secured. Stop here immediately to get them fixed."
or "We noticed that you engine is not running very well today, stop here for a tune-up."
And while you wait, they enter into their database as much info about you as they can glean. eg: license plate number, age range, sex, martial status (wedding ring on his finger?), how many children you have (size and type of car, and whether there is a baby seat in the car), income range (based on your appearance, type of car you drive, and whether you pay by credit card or cash), etc, etc.
You can stop doubleclick.net from resolving to its normal address using a "hosts" file on both Linux and Windows. I think Linux also gives you a way to block ip addresses, but I'm not familiar with it.
The shareholder is always right.
I use squid as a transparent proxy on my firewall, which lets me manage the hosts file on one machine for all internal clients. All the marketing sleeze is localhost'ed and I use Bannerblind in Mozilla to remove the dead space from the page layout. It saves me bandwidth and desktop real estate.
Most banner ads don't really bother me though, unless they're animated and blink nasty school girl colors in my face while I'm trying to read something. Mozilla is good for this too, since it can disable animated gifs, or only allow them to run once.
Brian
Under Linux it's /etc/hosts
Under Windows 2000 it's c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Linux and other *nixes that I know of: /etc/hosts
Notes for Windows: %systemroot% is your Windows directory, normally c:\windows or c:\winnt. The hosts file has no extension.
Windows 95, 98, and ME:
%systemroot%\hosts
Windows NT 4, 2000, and XP:
%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
On both operating systems, a line is:
0.0.0.0 hostname
where 0.0.0.0 is the IP address you want the name to resolve to (like 127.0.0.1) and hostname is the name you want to redirect (like ads.doubleclick.net)
It's an operating system, not a religion.
Just last week I spent a week's vacation in San Diego, using my compuserve account (otherwise unused except for email) to access the Grand Internet. Interestingly enough, the only pop-up ad I received all week through CIS was an ad that said something to the effect of "click through to here to buy a product to prevent you from getting these pop-up ads again". It's a pop-up ad advertising a product that would prevent a specific pop-up ad from popping up. AOL users are getting the same pop-up ad. It seems to me (and I am a lawyer) that this is little more than extortion. It's a message that says nothing other than "pay me money, and I'll stop bothering you". I'm not a class action attorney (I do trusts and estates work), but it seems to me that this kind of advertisement is actionable, because it's not really advertising a product - it's not much more than "protection".
Not only that, but I also noticed that while using CIS software to access the Internet, Real Player added a framed advertisement to my IE windows requesting that I visit their website and pay them for an upgrade (before you knock IE, remember that most Windows users use IE and Real may just as easily be able to effect other browers - I wouldn't know, I'm not a programmer). I'm not sure this is actionable, as Real One gets installed when the Compuserve software is installed, but it is annoying as all hell, and I don't like it, and I'll be damned if I ever give them any money. Anyone out there running AOL or CIS should check out their IE brower as well. The software adds a real player icon to the IE toolbar.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!