Posted on 02/23/2005 5:30:31 PM PST by holymoly
The Department of Homeland Security has named Claria, an adware maker that online publishers once dubbed a "parasite," to a federal privacy advisory board.
An executive from Claria, formerly called Gator, will be one of 20 members of the committee, the department said Wednesday.
"This committee will provide the department with important recommendations on how to further the department's mission while protecting the privacy of personally identifiable information of citizens and visitors of the United States," Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the department's chief privacy officer, said in a statement.
Claria bundles its pop-up advertising software with ad-supported networks such as Kazaa. Recently, the privately held company has been trying to seek credibility by following stricter privacy guidelines and offering behavioral profiling services to its partners.
In the past, Claria's pop-up ad software has riled some users who claimed it was annoying, installed without permission, and not easy to delete. Publishers also were irked about pop-up ads for a rival's product appearing next to their own Web sites. Catalog retailer L.L. Bean sued Gator for alleged trademark infringement.
Claria's representative on the Homeland Security privacy board is company Vice President D. Reed Freeman, a former Federal Trade Commission staff attorney. Other members include executives from Intel, Computer Associates International, IBM, Oracle and the Cato Institute.
The committee is tasked with providing "external expert advice to the secretary and the chief privacy officer on programmatic, policy, operational and technological issues that affect privacy, data integrity and data interoperability."
In February 2003, Gator settled a high-profile case brought by The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dow Jones and other media companies. Terms of that deal were quiet, but Claria appears to have stopped delivering pop-ups to those publishers' sites.
I hope this doen't mean I'm going to have to scan for "gov-ware". I think my computer spends about 30% of its CPU time searching for mal-ware as it is.
I swear I just got rid of the worst adware that was a severe threat to my computer. It's amazing; but maybe keeping your enemy close to you is thing to do. Or maybe not....
Eh, the UN put Sudan on the Human Rights commission.
The very first spyware I ever caught on my computer was Gator. They were one of the pioneers!
Gator was a little program that you could use to fill out forms. Just enter all your personal information into it, and presto, you could fill out forms at the push of a button.
Only trouble was, it was constantly in communication with Gator HQ, sending them data about all the websites you visited and, I assume, sending all that personal information as well.
Nobody had even heard of spyware at that point. I actually picked it up from the BetaNews website. Even they didn't know what they were distributing--at least I hope they didn't.
And now they're going to be advising the Dept. of Homeland Security on "privacy". This strikes me as a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Yes, fox in the hen house:
I run 4 programs to get rid of spyware and malware.
Adaware, spybotsd, pestpatrol and counterspy. I hate the stuff, worst computer I've fixed had 2500+ spyware on it.
I just dealt with one that had 1505 spyware files and 53 viruses.
Reformatted the entire system and just started from scratch...
I got nailed by Comet Cursor years ago. It was a pain to manually clean it out of the registy, but it made me comfortable with regedit. By the time I first ran across Gator, I knew what it was.
Look, we have to resort to comparisons to genocidal militant Islamist regimes to softer the blow to Americans' right to privacy on this one.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.