Yahoo Accused of Spyware-Related Misdeeds - Who are the Spyware Companies?
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Many of you have heard of 180solutions before. There are some other interesting players here. Edelman cites Intermix and Qklinkserver. He makes a particularly distressing point about the latter: "I have tested the Qklinkserver advertising software at length. Of the links I have received from Qklinkserver, every single one ultimately passes through Yahoo Overture. As best I can tell, Yahoo Overture is the sole source of funding for Qklinkserver."
And Intermix? It settled for $7.5 million with the New York Attorney General's office last year after NYAG Eliot Spitzer sued the company. Spitzer accused Intermix of bundling hidden spyware into the millions of programs it gave away for free. You might be interested to know that Intermix owns the MySpace social networking site; both Intermix and MySpace are now owned by News Corp.
Intermix, 180solutions, and Qklinkserver are hardly alone. Direct Revenue has also been charged by Spitzer with including spyware programs in the free software it gave away. Spitzer found it particularly egregious that the company "deliberately designed spyware that, once downloaded, was extremely difficult for users to detect and remove."
Some analysts have linked Yahoo to Direct Revenue. If the two companies are connected, I see a shredding party in Yahoo's future. Indeed, the NYAG was able to show that Direct Revenue earned $226,964 from Yahoo Overture pay-per-click advertising during April 2005, to say nothing of May and June. As Edelman's lawsuit against Yahoo points out, "by placing ads into illegal platforms such as spyware programs, [Yahoo] wrongfully collected high search engine advertising fees for ads that are actually shown in contexts that are worth far less, if anything. It is well known that spyware advertising is much cheaper than search engine advertising." Indeed, never mind the "click" part; that sounds like plain old fraud to me.
Advertisers and businesses know that ads placed in spyware are worthless or even harmful to them. Edelman's lawsuit goes on to say that "Advertisers want no part of spyware-delivered advertising. Staff of the FTC and the New York attorney general's office have repeatedly instructed advertisers to be wary of spyware-delivered advertising. Furthermore, advertisers recognize spyware for the scourge that it is, and they therefore seek to keep their ads out of spyware."
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