Claria Swears It's Going Straight

from the we-mean-it,-really dept

Mon, Apr 3rd 2006 8:32am — Carlo Longino

A couple weeks ago, Claria said it was going straight and giving up the adware business in favor of a new product that builds a personalized home page for users based on their surfing history, or, as SiliconBeat puts it, "leveraging traffic-snooping expertise". The company is certainly working hard to give the impression that they've changed their stripes, but, as some critics are noting, many people are unlikely to be comfortable with having something monitor everything they surf, even if Claria says it doesn't track users' personal information -- and they may be doubly shy of letting Claria do it, given the company's past. Perhaps a bigger question, though, is will the product succeed? Asking users to keep an application running just to serve them up a personalized home page doesn't seem like a great tradeoff, while there's little evidence that surfing behavior is actually a better criteria with which to set up a personalized page than simply letting users choose the content they want.

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12 Comments

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Ben, 3 Apr 2006 @ 9:43am

Hmmmm...
Sounds fishy to me. But thats just cause i've had to deal with them before. oh well. I'm curious to see if they will come and leave another comment just like the last time Techdirt wrote about Gat...i mean Claria.
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SuperJudge, 3 Apr 2006 @ 9:44am

Anybody...
Anybody who falls for this probably deserves the wake-up call.
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Apr 2006 @ 9:48am

Even if they went legit, I would still boycott their products as punishment for past bad behavior.
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MrCrispy, 3 Apr 2006 @ 10:07am

Thank you Claria!!!
Wow, thank you so much! I've always wanted someone to monitor what I do on the internet and use up more of my system resources. I could never imagine making my own personalized home page on one of the many sites that offer such a service. I don't know what I would have done without you guys. Oh, and by the way, GO TO HELL.
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Apr 2006 @ 10:20am

Free Porn
Will it suggest lots of free porn sites for me?
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JL, 3 Apr 2006 @ 10:22am

No thanks...
Sounds too fishy to ever be accepted. I'd rather keep my homepage simple and just have it set to Google. Googles personalized homepage isn't too bad either...
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Pariah, 3 Apr 2006 @ 10:35am

No Second Chances
No, nope, negatory.

No second chance for the scum who unleashed Gator on the world.
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Numberonewithabullet, 3 Apr 2006 @ 10:44am

Gator, Claria, a rose by any other name
Still stinks. I bought new hard drives and lost tons of data getting rid of gator, i hope their servers spontaneously combust.
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mr. rogers, 3 Apr 2006 @ 11:29am

call the cops
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Bill, 3 Apr 2006 @ 11:32am

Re: No thanks...
Google's personalized homepage rocks. But try this - sign up for Fortune.com - one of the three recent links to stories says, "Why Google will falter in 2006" - then you click on the link and they have blocked the link to the story.
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mr. rogers, 3 Apr 2006 @ 11:35am

call the cops
SOMEONE STOLE MY E-WALLET. i spent a few years working on home pc's and found that most people who had gator asked for it. not that i'm saying people deserve spyware. funny how microsoft antispyware never identified claria. i guess not that funny the only thing it does identify is firefox. free pestpatrol for everyone!!!!!
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Martha, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:44pm

Re: Re: No thanks...
Check out Fortune's site - I can't find the article on a cursory glance through. Maybe it was an April Fool's thing? Although I don't see why google would do that...
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