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

They'll always be Gator to me.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Steps to regaining legitimacy:

1. Change company name from Gator to Claria
   
2. Replace perjorative term 'spyware' with more neutral 'adware'
   
3. Threaten to sue anyone who still insists on saying 'spyware'.
   
4. Establish 'guidelines' for adware.
   
5. Stay within self-imposed 'guidelines'.
   
6. Convince antispyware vendors to remove Claria's name from list of threats.
   
7. ...
   
8. Profit!

Personally, I still despise Gator...uh...Claria, and all it stands for. The legitimization of spyware...uh...adware just leads to it being even more prevalent, and for every 'legitimate' adware app, there's a score of spyware apps out there that don't bother to play by the rules. Things would be much easier if all spyware could be treated like the infectious waste it is, but of course economics dictates that will never happen.
From TFA:

Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, says it's possible to track people online without being underhanded. The FTC is in favor of online advertising, she explains, "and sometimes tracking makes advertising work better for consumers."

In other news, cats are in favor of open birdcages.

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.

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.

The problem is, nobody bothered to ask users

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Few people in the online business community question the idea that marketing software should track user behavior. Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, says it's possible to track people online without being underhanded. The FTC is in favor of online advertising, she explains, "and sometimes tracking makes advertising work better for consumers." Esther Dyson, who has been harshly critical of spyware companies in her influential newsletter, Release 1.0, agrees. "As long as there's disclosure and people are given a choice, I think monitoring users' behavior isn't a problem," she says.

The problem is, the online business community never asked the right question. What they need in that disclosure is "Are you willing to give up half the bandwidth and computer memory you paid for so that we can serve you advertising?"

Won what?

[Anonymous Coward]

How a pop-up pariah won the adware wars.
- Won? The tech savy people ditched IE for Firefox, Opera or simply moved to Linux, so the tech savy people "won". The non tech savy people had no clue WTF was Gator, nothing changed today, they have no clue who Claria, 180 and other scumware makers are. All they know that their PC is spamming them with p0rn and it's slower. Not to mention they accept this blindly. Face it, 90% of computer users are too lazy, don't care and/or clueless.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

[bunnies for Allah]

Re:energy is liberated through blasphemy

[WrongSizeGlass]

Is there any chance I can get that on a T-shirt?

Re:Two Words: Law Suits

[minvaren]

So, they're the Scientology of spyware, then?

Our overlords know the truth

[oblisk]

I tried to goto claria.com from work.

Our webwasher message said i was denied for trying to access a site in the category: Computer Crime

Re:Claria / Google

[NeutronCowboy]

The day that Google sells my info to bombard me with pop-ups and silent software installs is the day that I'll treat them like Gator. In the meantime, I'll treat them like Google.