Spyware

By now, most of us have the read the reports that Claria (formerly Gator), a well-known and much-maligned advertiser and behavioural-marketing firm, have decided to ditch the adware business, liquidating their adware technology and focusing on PersonalWeb, an application that monitors the behaviour of a PC/Web user and customizes his or her browser's homepage.

If you haven't read the reports about Claria's new direction, read this. If you want to read Claria's service news story (press release) about PersonalWeb, try this one.

Claria's GAIN -- Gator Advertising and Information Network -- became one of the most infamous adware distributors and networks around, bundling adware with peer-to-peer programs and other free applications, gathering Web usage data for marketing purposes, and generally frustrating millions of PC users.

Now the company claims to be putting those practices in the past and moving forward with PersonalWeb. In an article dated March 24, ClickZ editor Pamela Parker wrote,

[Claria's] "PersonalWeb" offering, upon which it plans to focus, requires users to accept a download in exchange for a personalized homepage. Claria will offer these homepages in association with prominent publishers, or so the company expects. Once the software's downloaded, it'll gather behavioral data about users and that data will be used to better target advertising on the publishers' Web sites. Would that be considered adware? Or spyware? Or trackware?

Good question, especially from someone who doesn't think adware is "a bad thing." What exactly is PersonalWeb, and should we be worried about software of its kind? According to Claria's service news story by Robert Moskowitz,

With Personal Web (PW), the content of your home page will also be automatically and continually geared -- and re-geared -- to match your interests.

As with Google Sidebar, PW will be a software download that will profile the sites you visit and the content you select. It will determine your news and information interests in much the same way behavioral targeters already infer and anticipate your advertising interests. Using both algorithms and your personal choices, the PW system will bring you more and better content within the topics you're already reviewing, and will also "audition" other content you might find of interest.

"It's the next extension of search," says [Claria chief marketing officer] Scott Eagle. "This is the kind of passive profiling people have been asking for. With literally hundreds of papers, magazines and other channels available worldwide, we have access to a cornucopia of content. We need a system to help us make sense of the millions of documents available online."

Claria can market the application as a convenience tool, since it's certainly not a necessity or even something that approximates a necessity. PersonalWeb is a bit like a microwave -- useful, but with a few latent drawbacks. The pros associated with PersonalWeb are...

1. It makes surfing the Web a bit easier by gathering together links and information from your favourite Web sites and putting them all on your homepage.

2. That's all I can think of...

It creates this personalized homepage using, as stated above, certain algorithms, collected Web usage data, and the user's own input. It's essentially using the same information that's illicitly, or at least impolitely, collected by adware and spyware programs. But is PersonalWeb spyware?

Its use as a convenience tool is clear, as is its use to Claria. With PersonalWeb, they'll have free access to the Web usage stats of millions of users (if things go well). They'll be able to perfectly target ads to those who opt in to PersonalWeb's built-in advertising, and the information they collect will be worth plenty to other advertisers. Will Claria share that information or sell it? Will they keep it private and use it to refine their own behavioural monitoring technology?

PersonalWeb is still behind closed doors at Claria HQ, but when it's made available to the public, we'll have to look long and hard at this software and decide whether or not we're comfortable with its behavioural monitoring and data collection. Even if the end result of those practices is merely a personalized homepage, our consenting to the collection of personal data for so small a reward may signal a partial legitimization of spyware.

If a little spying doesn't hurt us with PersonalWeb, we might become more open to the propagation of personal data collection as a common software practice, and soon enough the concept of online privacy -- as watered down as it already is -- will be a fond and distant memory.

[spyware]  [security] [claria]