Tag Archives: Adware

WhenU’s Popup Victory

WhenU, now known as Claria, has won what it calls an “important decision for the entire Internet industry” in its motion to enjoin the Utah Spyware Control Act, passed in March. WhenU had argued the Act “affects legitimate Internet advertising companies and therefore violates the First Amendment and dormant Commerce Clause of the United States… Read More »

WhenU Addresses Its Image Problem

The whole WhenU story gets weirder and weirder. Last week Ben Edelman, the privacy hound, pointed out that the besieged pop-up provider WhenU was ‘cloaking’ itself. This means, in Ben’s words, ”using prohibited ‘cloaking’ methods to make search engines think certain WhenU servers offer content of interest to readers seeking certain search terms, when in fact… Read More »

Phishing And The Pop-up

Speaking to Well Fargo Online’s Wendy Grover this morning, I realised there’s a dimension to the debate about pop-ups that hadn’t occurred to me before: Phishing. The central argument used by companies such as Wells Fargo in their long-running litigation against the likes of WhenU and Gator (now Claria) is that they confuse the user.… Read More »

Popups Never Die, They Just Mutate

In response to my post yesterday, a reader suggested that with the proliferation of pop-up ad blockers in browsers and toolbars, who needs to worry anymore about ‘contextual’ ad services like WhenU? Since I installed the Google toolbar, I’ve forgotten what a pop-up looks like. Since I installed Win XP SP2, the “pop-ups blocked” counter on… Read More »

Utah, WhenU And Pop-Up Poaching

The spyware war continues. Ben Edelman, an expert on spyware, reports that “WhenU, a major provider of programs that show pop-up ads according to users’ web browsing activities, yesterday filed suit seeking that Utah’s Spyware Control Act be declared void and invalid.” WhenU effectively poaches browser real-estate by plopping its ads above those of others… Read More »