Is Yahoo Actively Supporting Adware?

conq writes "According to BusinessWeek, a report said Yahoo was actively supporting the companies that spawn pop-up ads. In early September, Yahoo engineer Jeremy D. Zawodny sounded off on his blog: "Do I like those [software installation] practices? Hell no. It's insulting and disrespectful."" update the story submission takes Jeremy out of context which he blogs about and says mean things about us.

Comments

Yahoo has been like this for some time

[It doesn't come easy]

Yahoo has been doing something like this for quite some time. Many years ago, Yahoo was the place to go to find the best price on products you could purchase over the net. However, they evolved into a search that only showed the prices from businesses that had a relationship with Yahoo. Mind you, they still claimed to find the best price on the web but in truth they only included companies with an arrangement with Yahoo (and those companies rarely had the lowest price) It may be business, but it's not trustworthy. So for me Yahoo lost my trust years ago. Now they are just one source for information and no more trustworthy than the next source.

In other news Jeremy D. Zawodny fired

[mrkitty]

Google's fired people for comments about the company, will yahoo?

What popups

[Anonymous Coward]

What popups?

I use Mozilla and selected privacy options.

Re:What popups

[sqlrob]

• You can use adblock to block swf's from Yahoo,
• You cn use the extension that you have to click to get the flash.
• You can use the underdocumented config setting to turn off popups from flash.

There's no good reason to put up with those popups.

Re:It's True!

[xmuskrat]

I really don't like those toolbars. It's like giving up screen real estate for things I'm not using. Might as well be a advertisement in that spot. If I want to use yahoo, I'll go to yahoo.

They are here to make money

[drzolo]

Lets face it. Yahoo is a huge company, so is Google. These companies are not here to be our friends. It just seems they are our friends, but in fact, their main goal is to make money (duh). So what is so suprising here? If pop ups increase revenue, they are good for the company. Why get attached personally to this? By that I mean, yahoo is for pop ups. Oh no! Who cares? Use Google. Google is bad too? Use Msn Search. If there is enough people who despise the current multi billion search engines, maybe that will give rise to open source search engines. Also, if the guy did post those comments while working, fire his ass. But if he did it outside working hours, I don't see a reason to fire that person.

Trust Yahoo?

[Red Flayer]

"Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Daniel L. Rosensweig insists the company has the highest standards. "Users can put their trust in us because that is what we're built on," he says."

What Rosenzweig fails to mention is that Yahoo, like most companies, will take advantage of that trust to the furthest extent they can get away with.

Trust us because we say our foundation is trust? I don't think so.

How about "Trust us because we take steps to prevent adware, not support it."

Or, "Trust us because we will never piggyback software and settings changes onto downloads from us that you choose to install."

Or, "Trust us because it's not in our financial interest to do bad things to you."

Unfortunately, none of these three possibilities are true... and until they are, I will not trust Yahoo farther than I can throw them.

Yahoo's Reputation

[rlp]

Yahoo risks tarnishing their reputation by turning over e-mail accounts of dissidents to the mainland Chinese government. Compared to that, adware is nothing.

Re:Yahoo's Reputation

[clifyt]

As much as I hate it, they do have to follow the law of the land.

If the US government had asked them to turn over email for accounts that originated in the US and were maintained on US servers, and the courts agreed with this decision -- they'd turn it over too...just the same way you'd roll if the gov't and the court system told you to do something.

What? You think that just because they are a US company that they don't need to follow the laws in countries they do business?

Again, I don't agree with it either...but so long as they maintain a physical business presence there, they need to follow the law like anyone else.

Re:Of course they are

[Anonymous Coward]

They have nothing to tangible sell. The only way for them to make money is to sell data they've garnered and they users who they garnered it from.

Just to point out, you're treading on very thin ice there lad. There is a very popular search engine company who sell some search appliances but whose major revenue stream comes from the sale of targeted advertisements. Targeted? How?

Every time you visit one of this company's pages, you'll get a unique cookie (if you haven't already got one), that won't expire until 2038, and your search terms are logged with datestamp, IP address, User-Agent and, of course, your identification number from that unique, immortal cookie. Not even the CIA could get away with this.

Now look, people tell search engines things that they wouldn't tell their closest friends and relatives. This is a hostile invasion of privacy - or, at least, will become one.

This is precisely the same information that, as you say, Yahoo! garners from its users to sell for profit. Not to say you failed to see the similarity, it's just that people seem to love this company and won't hold it to the same standards that they would expect of others. Classic hypocrisy.

Re:Not surprising

[JasonKChapman]

"...respecting the customer..." I'm sure they do respect their customers. The mistake is in thinking that the users of their free services are Yahoo!'s customers. They aren't. They're the product. The adverstisers, or perhaps piggybacking software companies, are the customers. The free service is the means used to produce Yahoo!'s primary product: eyeballs.

you're a fucking hypocrite

[Ender Ryan]

In the U.S. now, due to the Patriot Act, the federal government can detain anyone for any reason for any length of time and pretty much do to them anything they want. Therefore, if a company operating in the U.S. receives a court order to turn over information, they should refuse, otherwise they may be unknowingly complicit in violating someone's civil rights.

I really, really doubt the police in China told Yahoo what the investigation was about; you know, police are like that. They just demand information, and the law compels you to obey.

Perhaps we should have a trade embargo against China? That is, logically, the only way to go following your logic. If you operate in China, you have to follow the law. If you don't follow the law, you can't operate in China. The law, in your opinion(and mine too, certainly), violates the peoples' civil rights.

So, how about we stop all trade with China. Seems to be working just wonderfully for the people in Cuba...

Look, Yahoo isn't personally accountable for the actions of the Chinese government. The authorities demanded information and Yahoo obeyed the law. Did they even know what the investigation was about? It's not like the executives at Yahoo said, "No let's see. Who's civil rights can we violate today?" Give us a fucking break.

This is a political matter that deserves attention. When we have some politicians that aren't mouth breathing shit eaters, maybe it can be properly addressed. And perhaps when we damand the same of ourselves that we demand of others, we won't look like fucking hypocrites.

Re:Don't see a reason?

[indifferent children]

It destroyed an entire textile industry

To be fair, that textile industry had no textile workers. The fabric was 'spun' by marketers.

Re:Jeremys post in question..

[Verteiron]

Why do companies do this? Money. And when your competitor does it and you don't, you're letting them take advantage of an "opportunity" that you are not.

The real problem is even if the Yahoo execs aren't "evil", they have no good way out. If publicly-held company A is making money by taking over users' computers, company B's shareholders will want to know why company B isn't doing the same thing. And if company B's execs say they don't want to do it on something as flimsy as moral grounds, then company B's shareholders will fire said execs and replace them with robot drones.

Publicy-held corporations have a single motivation: profit. Anything you see such a company do, regardless of how "good" or "bad" it appears, was done to make the shareholders more money. If Yahoo's execs refused to submit their users to pop-ups and flash ads and such, they could very well be removed from the company.

Fucked up, huh?