Adware Company Claims It's Cleaning Up Its Act
In the last few months, we keep hearing stories about hated adware companies
trying to "clean up their reputations" and go legit. So far, however, most
have not been doing a very good job. Claria is trying to pretend its adware
isn't bad anymore because it's focused on embedded web ads instead of
popups, but it still involves a sneaky, not-very-upfront install with an
onerous end user license agreement. Then there's 180Solutions. The company,
who once sneakily put its own affiliate codes in place of the deserving
affiliates announced this week that it was finally suing some of its worst
distributors who they blame for the sneaky practices. Of course, before they
did that, they bought their biggest distributor -- and the one that was
considered the worst of the bunch by some (effectively rewarding the
affiliate). So, now it's Direct Revenue's turn. You may remember Direct
Revenue as the firm whose sneakily installed adware happened to sneakily
uninstall competitors' adware. The
firm, which claimed its new motto was "transparency, transparency,
transparency," wasn't particularly happy when
Newsweek made the company a
bit more transparent by revealing that it had changed its name repeatedly to
try to be a bit less than transparent to thousands of angry people whose
computers had slowed to a crawl through no fault of their own. It also
practiced any number of other sneaky tricks, including the affiliate code
swap that got 180Solutions in trouble. This new transparency from the
company finally came to light earlier this year when they launched its
latest adware company -- which was just as sneaky during the install
process, but which placed the adware's name (aurora) in the corner of the
popup so angry users could see who was slowing down their computer. You
still couldn't remove the product easily, as they required you to go to a
website to download a special program to remove the software -- leading to
many more angry people. More recently,
the company has apparently hired a new CEO who is promising that the company
has changed and is much more user friendly. So, one anti-spyware researcher
decided to check out those claims and found them to be severely lacking. The
"more transparent" disclosures were confusing and barely seemed to work at
all. The special app needed to uninstall the spyware, didn't even work at
all. It also sounds like the site you go to download the adware deleter may
install additional adware at the same time. Oh, and, of course, you sure
can't uninstall the thing through Add/Remove programs. And people wonder why
we have a
very difficult time believing any of these companies when they claim that
they're "transparent" and legit.
