p2p news / p2pnet: Would you trust a company enough to let it follow your every click online?

That’s the intro to a New York Times article

Who’d be following your every click? Wait for it ………

The despised Claria, aka Gator, which last month said it’s getting out of the adware business.

“Claria, a company once vilified for raining pop-up advertisements across the Internet through its Gator software, is betting its business that the answer is yes,” says the NYT. “Claria said it would announce Monday the release of PersonalWeb, a service that will let people download a piece of tracking software and receive a home page filled with news stories and other information tailored to their interests.”

“Let” people download it?

The story goes on, “Claria says that because those ads are so closely aligned to the user’s interests and recent behavior, marketers will be willing to pay more than they might on other sites for the ability to reach PersonalWeb users.”

Some analysts, and privacy advocates, “appear satisfied that Claria will stand by its pledge to track only the computer (whose owner it does not identify), not the personal information of the user,” says the NYT.

“Whether many consumers will use the service anyway - and give marketers an audience worth pursuing - is the big question.”

Actually, there’s more than one big question:

• Will Claria be clearly and unequivocally state that it wants to plant data mining software on the computers of marks?
• Will it explain what it’s doing and what the results could be - ie, floods of unwanted ads - in clear, un-glitzed language?
• Will it offer an easy way to for anyone dumb enough to get involved a method to have the information he or she has handed over reliably deleted if her or she changes his or her mind; and,
• Will Claria provide a way for people to be easily, quickly and permanently remove the “tracking software”?

It’s ironic that the New York Times is in effect running a free promo for the service. As it points out in the story, it was among the many major publications to sue Gator for copyright and trademark infringement.

“The cases settled out of court, but even as Claria changed its practices to suit privacy advocates - and built a business that generated $100 million in advertising in 2004 - it could not shake its reputation as an Internet bully,” it says.

Stay tuned.

Also See:
New York Times - Every Click You Make, They’ll Be Watching You, April 3, 2006
getting out - What could Tory copyright look like under Harper government?, April 3, 2006

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 1658 times