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You may not yet have heard of Claria,
but certainly Gator rings a bell. Gator, which renamed
itself Claria a month ago, is the controversial online behavioral
marketing firm that serves ad messages to more than 38 million
internet users. Gator/Claria’s many critics claim the company is
one of the great pests of the internet. They contend its software is
downloaded unwittingly by consumers and that the software
effectively hijacks ad inventory of reputable sites, serving its own
ads in place of or alongside those of legitimate advertisers who are
paying to have their ads served. Those critics include The
Washington Post, Gannett, Dow Jones and other publishers, which
brought and settled suits against the company for serving
unauthorized ads on their sites, and L.L. Bean, one of several
companies whose pending suits were recently consolidated. Also among
those critics, and a legal combatant as well, is PCPitstop.com,
a three-year-old site that offers users services to make PCs
run more efficiently. Two months ago, PC Pitstop and Gator reached a
settlement in a libel case filed by Gator over PC Pitstop’s
listing of the company on a spyware page warning users about
programs that track user behavior and sometimes interfere with
browsers. PC Pitstop agreed to remove Gator from the list. But now
PC Pitstop has figured out another way to warn consumers. Yesterday
it launched a Gator Information Center page to provide information
on Gator/Claria without mentioning the s-word. PC Pitstop chief
technology office Dave Methvin recently talked to Media Life about
Gator, Google-ing and where consumer responsibility begins and ends
on the net.
Why are you launching this site?
Our goal is to educate users
about what Gator does, how it works, and how it is installed on
systems, and also to inform people in as objective a way as possible
about Gator and its products.
We’re doing this for users and advertisers.
Advertisers are surprised to find that they’ve been advertising
through Gator, when they’ve actually gone through ad agencies and
paid for keyword searches on Overture, and they find their ads are
popping up in people’s faces.
We want people to know how the company works. The more they
know, the more open we can make the discussion, the more we can
concentrate on what it will take to fix the problem, whether it
means better discipline by Gator or action by the Federal Trade
Commission.
Is the general public aware of the existence
of Gator/Claria and what it does?
I think people find out about
Gator retroactively. If you go out on the web, you’ll find a lot
of negative feedback about Gator, and I think quite a few of the
people who post information about the experience feel it was
installed on their computer with them not realizing it.
They say, "Boy am I mad someone managed to pull one over
on me."
Whether it’s shame on them or shame on you is another of
the issues that needs to be discussed in the open.
Should we really require people to read a 14-page document
before they click the button to open a dialogue box?
You look at the number of users that Gator claims. It’s 35
million. Not a lot of them are aware of Gator. I think some of them
have installed it and don’t know it.
So you think a lot of people aren’t aware of
Gator because they haven’t been made aware?
PC Pitstop surveyed its users
about what was running on their computers. We wanted to know if they
were running Gator applications. Among the questions we asked
was, what was your experience like installing Gator
applications?
More than 70 percent said they didn’t know they had
installed a Gator application.
That's a huge number. Imagine 70 percent of people saying
they didn’t know they were running Microsoft Windows or Word or
Excel. Most of the people who have those programs know they’re
running them.
So something is wrong. I’m not saying Gator’s not trying
to let them know. I am saying it’s not working.
How did PC Pitstop first become aware of Gator
and get involved in the controversy?
The way it first
appeared on our radar is that we noticed people had--and this was
not Gator in particular-- a class of unwanted applications on their
PCs.
It began to become more and more obvious, with people
describing strange behavior, like pulling up their home page to
learn that it had been switched to a porn site.
Again, this was not Gator specifically but related to the
whole class of applications that people generally don’t want on
their computers. At the very least they don’t know they have
it installed.
Quite often they would come to us and say, you know, I keep
getting pop-ups on my computer, even though they had installed a
pop-up stopper. So we’ll look at the running programs, and they’ll
have Gator, WhenU and a popup stopper all at once.
If they were clearly aware of having Gator or WhenU on their
computer, why also install a piece of software to get rid of the ads
they’re supposedly allowing to be on their computer?
Something is wrong with this picture.
What do you hope to gain with this new Gator
Information Center?
We’ll go public with the site
and see what the reaction is. We hope people find it informative in
a variety of ways, first to find out whether they have Gator and
second, to remove it from their system. Third, if people feel there
was something about the Gator application that they want, we list
some alternative applications, like RoboForm, that offer similar
functions under better licensing terms.
People like to say there are two sides
to every issue. But if you search the internet, you don’t see
Gator with many positive comments. I’ll put our Googles against
their Googles any day. Look for “PC Pitstop sucks” or “Gator
sucks” and see which comes out with the higher number.
Note: Media Life calls to Claria yesterday for a
response to Methvin’s statements were not returned.
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