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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.
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.
..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?
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
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)
Precedent may have already lost them their case:
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:).
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