Going From Gator to Claria

Ant writes "Wired News has an article on the famous spyware company that went from Gator to Claria. From the article: 'Three years ago the company was considered a parasite and a scourge. Today it's a rising star -- selling virtually the same product. How a pop-up pariah won the adware wars.'" The name change happened about two years ago, and a lot has changed since then.

Comments

A Rose of a Different Name

[GSpot]

Is still a turd. I can't count how many times I have had to uninstall that gator trojan from family and friends computers. And before firefox/google toolbar for IE was around, you would look up and 15 windows would be open trying to sell you crap.

No punishment is too lean for these cockroaches.

Re:They'll always be Gator to me.

[SatanicPuppy]

Well, if they move to being a service that allows for targeted ads on advertisers pages, that's semi-acceptable to me. No popups, mind. But relevant picture ads are certainly better than irrelevant picture ads. It's at least a decent goal.

The question is, can Claria be trusted to gather enough personal information to allow for accurately targeted ads, and not use that information for evil? I think the answer to that question is no. Gator/Claria has the soul of a whore, and they'll sell you out to anyone for a nickle. Look how little time it took them to transition from being semi-useful to being pure evil in the first place!

Given the opportunity for profit, they'll go pure evil again.