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Major Advertisers Caught In Spyware Net
theodp writes "BW reports on Fortune 500 companies' use of adware - Sprint for its PCS phones, major banks peddling Visa cards, Sony and retailers including Circuit City. And Mercedes-Benz before the company, fielding complaints, put on the brakes. So far, law enforcement has mostly targeted the transmitters, but NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is threatening to hold accountable household-name advertisers that use adware networks. No longer, says Spitzer, can companies play dumb."
quite simply, the only way we will see the end of adware and spam is if they stop being profitable. this is excellent news, and i sincerely hope goes ahead with his threat.
So, if I want to harass my competitors, I can release spyware with their ads on it or pay for spyware distribution in their name? This would subject them to needless prosecution and distraction?
The transmitters can easily be traced. It is much harder to trace the source of the ads themselves. For civil suits, the "preponderance of evidence" might be a pretty weak standard because there is not much to go on to discredit the prosecution. Of course IANAL...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
to put it politely... bollocks... they subcontract it, they are responsible for it... they can't fob off the responsibility to the subcontractors... they are responsible for making sure that their subcontractors do it legally and ethically...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Unfortunately, unless some other big names in law jump on this, we won't see anything more of this after this article. This won't be the first time something like this happened.
The concept of "follow the money" unfortunately works way too well. Whether it's funding adware asshats or terrorist organizations, in order to cripple the bad guys, cutting off funding works wonders.
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>It's really hard to hard to control the means our ads get distributed using 3rd party agencies.
What you describe is willful ignorance. You know the problem exists but you just push the blame down the chain. This whole issue could be avoided if you put some care into the contracts you sign. It's probably better than getting sued by the NY Attorney General.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Can't companies already commit crimes in the name of their competitors? So, what's so special about the online world that is suddenly going to embolden people to commit federal crimes?
Don't you think that if someone is misrepresenting Proctor & Gamble, the NY AG is going to go straight to P&G and get their full compliance in solving the crime?
And for the companies commiting the fraud, is it really worth putting their entire company on the line over a stupid adware stunt?
I swear, do companies go out of their way to hire the lowest-IQ, most mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging, slope-foreheaded idiot they can find to be company shill^Wspokesman, or is it a side-effect of the job?
And why don't you know what the subcontractors you're using are doing? I know that, in every other industry that subcontracts work, the general contractor is ultimately responsible for the work. If they don't know what the subcontractor's doing, they get dinged for that on top of the actual faults in the work. Perhaps, if you don't have the expertise to ride herd on your subcontractors yourself, you should begin doing what construction and other general contractors do and write clauses into your advertising contracts that provide for big, nasty penalties for subcontractors who use adware/spyware and make those subcontractors liable to you for any problems they cause that cause you any liability, plus requires the people you hire to include indentical clauses in their contracts with anyone they subcontract out to as well (with likewise nasty penalties for failing to do so). Then enforce those clauses strictly. If the agency balks, take your business elsewhere because that's a sure sign they are doing something underhanded and don't want to be nailed down on it.
- Nobody is forcing you to advertise on the net (which even in 1999 was already the LEAST effective means of advertising, and has gotten worse in terms of credibility, results per dollar spent, etc)
- Nobody is forcing you to use the agencies you mentioned. Its not hard to check out the people you're dealing with. That you don't is the hallmark of the wilfully ignorant who don't do their due diligence
- Contrary to what you state, its very easy to control how your ads get distributed - just put in a clause that provides financial penalties if they use adware/spyware. Agencies that won't agree to that are obviously not going to make the short list. That you are so desperate that you go with someone who won't agree to such terms is a sign that your business plan is doomed.
What good is it developing a good product if, by the time you get to market, you've already pissed off every possible consumer?I doubt you really believe this. The big money is what brought the innovation. I'm sure there will be people lined up to tell me about how great it was when they used baud or Mosaic or whatever, or how anything new is just "fluff" (I'll agree with the "fluff" thing to some extent), but most reasonable people will agree that the internet has vastly improved. You can still do all the things you used to love "way back when". So many non geeks can do what they want now, too.
As you mentioned, you can dump nearly all trace of the advertising junk that exists now.
Non-geeks in oppressed countries that now have the tools to post, read, and exchange information online; they may not have been able to do this before the big cash brought the big innovation. Housewives with a coughing child can look online to see information that can help them decide if they need to take their child to the hospital.
So many of these things are supported by advertisements or other corporate interests. I'm not one of the "don't block ads" people, I block anything that blinks or slows browsing, but you have to acknowledge the benefit the capitalist interest brought - I'll certainly admit the harm it's brought. But overall, the good outweighs the bad.
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Elliot Spitzer doesn't give a damn about standing up for "regular folkes", all he cares about is being elected governor in a few years.
It's not hard to figure out that Commission Junction and its members might employ unethical practices. There are hundreds and hundreds of messages about it all over the internet. I'm sure a quick Google would turn up plenty.
Finding a reputable company to do business with is as simple as asking another company you know, trust, and respect who they place ads with. Even easier is to contact the site you want to advertise on directly. Often it's cheaper, too.
And the line about being a "small company with little know how in advertising" is totally bogus. Placing on-line ads is so easy, even 15-year-olds with their own blogs do it. This is exactly the kind of thing that Spitzer is talking about where companies pretend they don't know what's going on. You're just making excuses and it makes your company sound slimey.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
The same thing is happening with the bandit signs you see along the roads in the public rights-of-way. Laws originally were enacted to go after the person placing the signs and since these are usually lower income/education folks, they line up for this type of work and the signs never stop.
Now many states are starting to go after big-name homebuilders, one homebuilder in Florida was recently fined $49,000 for over a hundred signs.
This NY AG guy seems alright to me.
He is certainly ambitious. But compare what he has done to get restitution for consumers to what the Federal govt. has done. He has been way more aggressive than the SEC in going after finacial malfeasance. He got over a billion dollar settlement with Wall St. for issuing research reports that pumped up dodgy dot-com companies during the boom, for example. So I think he is effective, in fact he's been actually restoring the balance of power between citizens and corporations, which, believe me, is not even on Bush's agenda, quite the opposite.