Claria's New Non-Adware Offering... Delivered Through Adware

from the that-doesn't-seem-right dept

Claria keeps trying to reinvent itself as a "less evil" company -- but somehow it never seems to work. It's been two years since the company changed their name from Gator to try to convince people they were a "marketing" company, rather than a adware/spyware company where almost all of their installs were done without the clear knowledge of their "users." Earlier this year, the company tried to claim it was getting out of the "adware" business by doing a bit of traditional advertising arbitrage. Basically, they'd use their cash to buy up lots of advertising at cheap rates and resell it in smaller chunks at a premium. There's nothing wrong with that... except that the behavioral targeting they planned to do with the ads was still based on (whoops!) their surreptitiously installed software. Now, it turns out, the situation may be even worse. Anti-spyware researcher Ben Edelman has apparently noticed that Claria is selling these new ads... through sneakily installed spyware/adware programs. So, basically, the new (not really) cleaned up Claria isn't offering the surreptitiously installed adware themselves, they're just using other bad adware providers to deliver it for them.