Don't Call It Spyware

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/spyware_pr.html

Don't Call It Spyware 

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.
By Annalee Newitz

  <http://c.lygo.com/s.gif> 

Back in 2002, Gator was one of the most reviled companies on the Net. Maker
of a free app called eWallet, the firm was under fire for distributing what
critics called spyware, code that covertly monitors a user's Web-surfing
habits and uploads the data to a remote server. People who downloaded Gator
eWallet soon found their screens inundated with pop-up ads ostensibly of
interest to them because of Web sites they had visited. Removing eWallet
didn't stop the torrent of pop-ups. Mounting complaints attracted the
attention of the Federal Trade Commission. Online publishers sued the
company for obscuring their Web sites with pop-ups. In a June 2002 legal
brief filed with the lawsuit, attorneys for The Washington Post referred to
Gator as a "parasite." ZDNet called it a "scourge." 

Today Gator, now called Claria <http://www.claria.com/> , is a rising star.
The lawsuits have been settled - with negligible impact on the company's
business - and Claria serves ads for names like JPMorgan Chase, Sony, and
Yahoo! The Wall Street Journal praises the company for "making strides in
revamping itself." Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that
Microsoft came close to acquiring Claria. Google acknowledges Claria's
technology in recent patent applications. Best of all, government agencies
and watchdog groups have given their blessing to the company's latest
product: software that watches everything users do online and transmits
their surfing histories to Claria, which uses the data to determine which
ads to show them.

Apart from plush new offices at the northern edge of Silicon Valley, it's
remarkable how little the latter-day Claria differs from the old Gator. It's
true that the company has toned down its most aggressive tactics.
Journalists, watchdogs, and regulators seem mollified. For the most part,
though, the company is in the same business as before, courting the same
customers and selling a product that does the same thing in the same ways.
Claria wears in a sharp suit and has a scrubbed face and coiffed hair - but
it still looks a lot like Gator.

CEO Scott VanDeVelde doesn't deny this. "I don't feel like there's a need to
wipe the slate clean," he says. "Our technologies are dead center of where
the market is going."

The spyware wars are over - and spyware has won. 

...

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