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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.
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... The advertising practices suck - but I think it should be the FTC dealing with it not class action lawsuits. Doubleclick can't afford to loose - it just isn't going to happen IMHO.
--
draziw - +3 karma for low user id
So I don't have one new message waiting for me?
" If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you could be part of the class
You can be part of the the Class action if you are willing to admit that you are stupid.
Click now to discover whether YOU are eligible for a part of the MULTIMILLION payoff against DoubleClick!!!
Yes, you too can be part of the twenty-first century "I'M SO STUPID I DESERVE MONEY" movement.
Click now and receive $$$'s!!! (*)
* Subject to reality.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
For me to get into this class action lawsuit I have to admit that I am a dumb ass and was tricked by a "FUI" ...
man
No manual entry for
is there an IQ test or something?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
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.
It's all well and good asking for people who have been fooled by these, but to be fair, how many people who ever have thought those things were genuine are likely to ever find out about this action?
Oh well, at least if I get part of the settlement I can start buying some of those penis pills and russian brides everyone keeps telling me about. I mean honestly, I don't even know half of these people. I guess I just met em at a party or something, but they seem to have gotten my name confused with someone elses. Jesus, you'd think I was on some kind of mailing list or something.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
All of this, of course, was on his KDE desktop... (no, I've no idea why he had pop-ups enabled.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well this is why advertising is legal. I've said it before and I'll say it again - all advertising is fraudulent. There is no such thing as an unfraudulent ad. "Puff talk" or "puffery" is the legal term of art for 'de minimus fraud' and the only reason it's okay is because to prove up fraud, you need to show reliance. Few people, if any, are going to admit they relied on Katherine Zeta Jones saying X product is the best deal around. Thus, the fraud continues.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
..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..
I dont understand why they have to fake the AD's. Just give me something I'd click.
Barely clothed Hot chicks. They could have them hold Linux distros with headlines like "Real men use this distro" or "How hard is your Hardware".
Hey, how many of you checkout a vendor just because of a cute Booth Babe? Exactly...
Doesnt it always go that advertisements carry some degree of falsity and the viewer must exercise his/her own good judgement ? If there is a similar ad on a television stating that if you sweat profusely after a small walk you could be suffering from high blood pressure, would it warrant a class action suit ?
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Just think, if I hadn't blocked images from all of doubleclick's servers, and disabled those popups... I might be in for some money! Curse you, Mozilla!
I don't have the background to comment on the legitimacy of this suit -- but I sure am curious to see how it plays out, since I have always hated the deceptiveness of those ads. My wife gets fooled occasionally, and I have to clean all that Gator crap off the computer *again*. If only she'd swear off IE for good....
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I find this lawsuit a bit interesting, for where, except the internet, would we find this kind of advertisement. Consider a road sign telling you "Danger Road blocked" and an "alternative" rout that ends in Honest Harry's gas station. Sure, you might be able to tell that it was a fake sign, but is it legal because of that?
Anything that makes the Internet easier to use and less scary for the common user without limiting anybody else is a good thing.
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?
DoubleClick's clients should really be upset. If you were paying DoubleClick to drive traffic to your site, wouldn't you want traffic that at least voluntarily sought information about what you provide rather than fools who clicked the "your system is not secure" pseudo dialog box?
Amazing magic tricks
On the other hand, if it takes an ambulance chasing laywer to stop these practices, that's not entirely bad. Except that they don't have the consumer's best interest in mind, they have their own best interest in mind.
Legislation through Litigation is the wrong answer. If they really did soemthing illegal or wrong, there are appropriate gov't agencies to deal with it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
On the other hand... Does anyone remember those Orkin commercials where it looks like a cockroach is crawling across your screen? Clever advertising, even if it is misleading. There was a lawsuit a while back by some idiot woman who threw her shoe at the TV when she saw the ad. If I remember correctly, she lost the lawsuit, as she should have.
True, it's a slightly different scenario for this DoubleClick lawsuit. The key difference is that in the cockroach commercial, it's /obviously/ a commercial. Not so for those damn DoubleClick ads, to the moderately-literate computer user.
IMHO, the best eventual outcome of this DoubleClick lawsuit would be some laws requiring Internet advertisers (operating in the U.S. of course, sigh) mark their ads as such, with a big red "ADVERTISEMENT" in the upper left corner. Sort of like newspaper ads.
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 ads often appear with fake window frames, so that the X takes you to the advertised site. You don't have to be that much of a bumpkin to be taken in.
Well, if you've never had anyone you know get worried because of those ads then you must not know *that* many people who aren't terribly computer literate.
I've had family members and I've had consulting clients who I've had to explain the situation to. With the family members it's fairly easy because they aren't (usually) going to question whether you know what you're talking about, but it's a d*mn pain in the ass when it's a non-knowledgable consulting client. You've told them one thing, but a message that popped up on their computer told them something different. Do they believe you or "Windows"?
In the "real world" deceptive advertising practices are illegal. This ought to apply to double-click just as much as anyone else.
That said, advertisers have never been allowed to make patently false claims. Just because these adds were on the internet, and not on TV, or radio, or in a magazine has no bearing on anything. Given the amount of latitude they have to stretch, bend, and massage the truth, it should be enough. Suing for outright lies seems pretty reasonable, and the couple cents per person they get in damages will make a nice symbolic warning.
You mean you dont use FVWM95???
Lagito ergo expectabo
Shouldn't they be able to get in on the lawsuit? After all, if a user gets tricked by a FUI in a large company, it's usually IT that has to deal with it--that means added support costs.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
From the Statement of Facts:
(emphasis mine)Ya gotta love a lawyer with the balls to characerize something as "diabolical;" not merely "greedy," "unethical," or even simply "fraudulent." They called this behavior worthy of the devil himself.
From Claims:
Hopefully this is a slam-dunk. The fact that they disguised their "puffery" such that people didn't realize they were ads gained them more clicks, but hopefully also a level of "reliance" beyond the low level that usually shields advertizing hyperbole from fraud claims.
Hopefully it won't stop here. The $505 per plaintif ($500 punative damages and an amusing $5 compensatory damages) has some teeth, but the most wronged parties aren't the ignorant clickers, but the ISPs who are paying to shuffle this crap back and forth. I keep wondering when the ISPs are going to sue spammers and junk ad pushers for some sort of trespass/DOS. Now they'd have a case for compensatory damages...
What I find to be a cleverer advertising method is to have your ads built into little games that pop up. I've been distracted by one in particular from IBM where you have to put different shapes into their respective slots before the timer runs out. Exactly like this kid's game that a childhood friend of mine (don't remember the name of it though). If some ad threw out a tetris game, it'd be all over for me.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
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.
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
I thought plaintiff has to prove a harm with money value. What is that for clicking a diversion site? Different if the diversion instantly installs nasty-ware without further confirmation, but I don't think that's the case.
"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.
If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you could be part of the class.
Yeah, the special education class.
No matter what they do, DoubleClick will always, repeatedly, be able to claim a mistrial for conflict of interest. After all, where in the US are you going to find a Judge that doesn't hate banner ads? (Then again, maybe that's why they filed it in PA...)
If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you could be part of the class.
/. ? Get yourself back to AOL and stop getting big ideas.
If you've ever been tricked by one of _those_ ads then what are you doing reading
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
The programmers at DoubleClick are coding wizards...they must have spent months getting Windows APIs to work on my Mac. I don't even need to have Virtual PC running to access these important system messages...
WHy do they sue doubleclick? When benneton had an 'inappropriate' billboard at some time benneton had to fix it, not the ad agency nor the billboard owner... crazy stuff..
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
This lawsuit seems rather frightening to me, if these guys win and this is declared to be fraudulent practice, then this could have huge implications for programing. I would hate to have to have to reference a chart and make sure that any GUIs I built did not resemble any of the system boxes from every operateing system out there. Notice that, the add that they display as an example looks like a windows box. Did the original programers intend to market to a mac audience and not even bother to make sure that their banners did not look like a windows system message? Prehaps they were marketing to a linux useing audience. And when you click the add you do get a message. I would say that any advertisement would be clasified as a message. Also I am sure that some system did help in the creation of that message, so how on earth would that window be missrepresenting themselves any one. I guess that people can be fooled by any thing. Oh and on a last not any one who wants to buy the full quit claim deed to our nations capatiol can call me, its a wonderfull piece of property. Lets grow up and not blame everyone for the ignorance of a few.
Faith_Healer -- The antethsis to almost everything, and the worlds worst speller.
It seems to me that the success of this suit hinges on who created the ads. Doubleclick serves these ads, sure. But shouldn't the defendant(s) be the company(ies) whose ads these are? The complaint does claim that DC did create (not just serve) these ads, but is this correct?
From the complaint:
"19. In a diabolical scheme to deceive computer users into misdirecting their computers to Internet sites of defendant's clients, thus disrupting the work the user was otherwise performing, defendants devised and disseminated deceptive advertising banners that gave the appearance of being system warnings or computer alerts being issued by the user's own computer, and enticing the computer user to appropriately respond to the imposter alert or warning."
"...devised and disseminated..." If DC did create the ads, then, yay--go to it Fer-man. Otherwise, I think he's trying to get his hand in the wrong pair of pants.
--an aside: "a diabolical scheme"? Dr. Evil is CEO of doubleclick?
Actually, no. I've had doubleclick and many varants of them in my host files for years. I've still seen these false error messages. And lately I've seen my computer installing "something" when I reboot, even though I know I haven't installed anything! The truth is that scum like doubleclick know about host files and are constantly adding new domains and changing ip addresses to keep them from being blocked on your system. You can only play catch-up, but you can't keep them out this way. It's far from an ultimate answer, or effective.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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
The reason McDonalds served its coffee hot enough to scald is simple: It allowed them to use lower quality beans, without people noticing. In short, they were able to profit by making their products more dangerous for customers.
You may as well say that we can't protect people from being duped by Ponzi schemes, so why not make them legal? The fact is, these are false advertisements, designed to convince the recipient that there is something wrong with his or her computer. This should be outlawed, and I'm hard pressed to see how such a rule violates anyone's freedom of speech.
Is California really stupid? Or just avidly pro-consumer?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
...would that have possibly been a Hong Kong FUI?
*rimshot*
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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!
People who actually believe those are error messages are StupidPeople (tm). Like, you can't tell that it's part of a web page, stupid.
Just a little side note: It reminds me of all these stupid people on my cousin's street. I came to L.A. for a week (I live in Mexico City, if you must know) to visit my cousin and his buddies, and to go booze it up on the Sunset strip. So there's this stupid restaurant on the corner of his street, another one of those "trendy" restaurants with one-syllable names (because StupidPeople cannot remember names with more than one syllable--it overflows their stack), and it's always crowded. The StupidPeople who eat there always park their cars on my cousin's street, and as a result, my cousin and all his neighbors are at a loss to find parking spaces. During the weekend, it's especially bad. To make matters ironic, his street is permit-parking only. So he called the parking enforcement agency and they came by and ticketed at least 10 different cars. All these StupidPeople came back to their cars, saw the tickets, and started reading the parking signs, as if they didn't know that it's illegal to park there without a permit. What's even funnier? My cousin's roommate was outside when one such group of StupidPeople pulled up in their Stupid Ugly Vehicle (SUV) and he told them that they can't park there. They did anyway, got a ticket, and then acted all surprised when they did (I watched them gleefully from the window when they returned to their car).
I call them StupidPeople because they all look the same. They all have this Los Angeles accent and vocabulary that is different than in, say, Louisville. All the women have stupid, meaningless tattoos on their lower backs. All the men have a lame haircut. And you can tell by their speech that unlike the typical computer geek, they do not have a brain inside their head. They are simply StupidPeople. Their stupidity drives me up the wall.
Back to banner ads: People who fell for this trick should not be allowed to use a computer in the first place. And the people who made these stupid ads should be shot for lack of imagination.