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Advertisers May Face Ridicule For Adware
An anonymous reader writes "A ZDNet article reports that the FTC may be gearing up to humiliate companies that advertise via adware." From the article: "The FTC would publicly announce and publish the name of a company that advertises using adware that installs itself surreptitiously on consumer PCs or using spyware, Leibowitz said. He would recommend publicly shaming advertisers to the other FTC commissioners if the adware problem doesn't decrease, he said."
Wow, public shaming is as severe as hitting those offenders with a wet bus ticket or a tap on the knuckles.
Wake me up when there's a public stoning.
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FTC actually siding with the people, instead of corp america??? Whoa, looks like pigs can now free to fly..
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
"The FTC would publicly announce and publish the name of a company that advertises using adware that installs itself surreptitiously on consumer PCs or using spyware..."
Thereby granting said company immense public exposure and advertising...
No such thing as bad publicity.
By... ummm... shaming them... umm... wait.. I think I see a possible flaw in this plan.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They should also complete the loop and list companies that get paid to advertise Adware. High on the list of those companies is Google. I believe that they make millions advertising adware on their search results and through their adsense network. I'm sure that Yahoo and other big ad networks are also to blame. Worse yet, they are often misleading. Searching google for spyware removers gets you ads for more spyware!!!
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
This isn't just an issue for spamvertisers. Delegating fundamental business processes (e.g., customer billing) to third parties seems to be a popular with all sorts of companies as a means of obfuscating procedures and dodging responsibility for mistakes. I call bullshit on all of it!
For example, is a piece of software that "phones home" for ANY reason considered spyware?
If it is without the knowledge of the user, then yes, that is pretty much the definition of spyware.
If a program pops a dialog up and says, it wants to know if its ok to send DoubleClick all my history urls and cookies and then I click yes and it phones home... Then well... I'm just dumb, but thats not spyware.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
When the public fears the government, you have tyranny.
Perhaps a weak analogy, but if companies started seriously fearing public opinion - as opposed to say Sony BMG[1] - that would certainly be a good thing.
Fear of the public will stimulate healthy competition (and not under the table/behind closed doors competition).
[1]
Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
--SonyBMG manager Thomas Hesse
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
(Name-and-shame suffers from two big problems. First, there's no actual requirement for there to be any evidence of Adware. The FCC doesn't have to prove a case to anyone, it only has to write down a name. Second, if a name is put down that shouldn't be there, redress will be next to impossible. The media outlets can claim - justifiably - that they're not responsible for official statements from Government. I know of nobody who has sued the Federal Government in civil court for slander or libel, and they've probably got immunity to such suits anyway.)
Actually, there is a better method and the Supreme Court provided it. The Government is allowed to seize private land for the purpose of boosting the economy in a region, under a recent interpretation of Eminent Domain. Adware companies damage the Internet economy. It would seem to follow that the Government can seize those companies and sell them to other, less malign, individuals. (It's less messy than the hung-drawn-and-quartered method someone else proposed, too.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One technique that seems to get under spyware author's skin is when you bother them at home or on some other form of their own turf. When my best friend and I were leading the charge against Xupiter we spent countless manhours tracing the network of entities responsible for the software and staged multiple phone calls to the home residences of business partners, requests for information from ad affiliates, etc. Lots of WHOIS cross-referencing and corporate document searches but it was worth it to genuinely make life uncomfortable for these guys. Saied Yomtobian called me every dirty name in the book when all I did was ask a few questions about his son being listed on a corporate document for "Xupiter, Inc." listed with the California Secretary of State. It was common practice for us to track down the responsible parties and publish transcripts of our findings. Would be interesting to know the legality of publishing recorded phone calls between angry end users and spyware authors. I think the path to a spyware-free web is public humiliation of the offenders. A multitude of websites already exist toward this end but I think some good old-fashioned activism should be done and its progress published for the world to see. Another thing I did a year or so back was trace the money trail of a piece of spyware that hijacked Google search results. Upon infection I identified the ad affiliate responsible for the hijacked ads inside some source code, documented our findings to the affiliate and got them to terminate their contract with the spyware vendor. It was a good week or two before the vendor (Clientman/Odysseus Marketing) found a new affiliate. I'd guess that that cost them a lot of money in lost ad revenue. I like the idea of a continually updated Wiki where people can collaborate and take action. http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,60694-1. html?tw=wn_story_page_next1