Adware and Under-Wear - The Definitive Guide

Probably very few of us are above a bit of snooping every now and then. As kids, we'd play "Green Berets" in the woods, "spying" on the guys who were building the new house down the road. You probably did something similar. Now that we're adults, you and I sometimes prick our ears up to "listen in" on another's conversation, or peer over the pages of our magazine to watch the doings of a family member or fellow worker. If we don't have much of a conscience, or if we see a pressing need, we might go even further -- listen to another's phone messages, pry into someone else's email, poke around in their computer files. It's part of the human condition. Parents snoop through their kids' sock drawers, and the kids return the favor. Bosses keep track of their employees' Net surfing habits. Spouses comb through their better halves' credit card statements. It's human nature to want to know what others are up to, and depending on the situation, it can be classed as harmless nosiness, standard business practice, harsh necessity, or an invasion of privacy.

Both the computing world and commercial enterprises indulge in as much snoopery as any other branch of human existence, and the ethical questions and variety of practices employed in both areas are just as wide-ranging as anywhere else -- especially when they overlap. At the more objectionable end of personal and business computing is the branch of often harmful, usually unethical, and always invasive category of software utilities, browser add-ons, and advertising tactics clumped together under the terms "spyware," "adware," "thiefware," "malware," and other labels. These range from programs that transmit data on your surfing and purchasing habits to advertising cartels, all the way to virus-like programs that hijack your computer and force you to visit designated sites (anything from vendors to porn purveyors). They may change your computer's settings, damage your file structure, disable other programs, and surreptitiously share your computer's resources with other networks.

Business sites can find that shoppers are being led away from their sites to the competition's Web catalogs. The loss in individual privacy is enormous; the loss in revenue to businesses victimized by these Internet boondogglers is incalculable. In some instances, home users find that these programs render their machines virtually unusable, while Net businesses find their attempts to honestly sell their goods are thwarted. Over 25% of Websites employ some kind of "in-your-face" advertising, according to the Internet research firm Cyveillance; many of these advertising techniques cross the line into what I'm terming, only somewhat whimsically, "underware." Government regulation is almost non-existent, so the only restraints on advertisers is their own sense of right and wrong, and what they believe the market will and will not tolerate.

And generally, the market will tolerate a lot.

Where Did It Come From? A Brief History of Adware

There seems little doubt that the whole idea of ad- and spyware came about as a legitimate extension of Internet advertising. It didn't take long for the idealistic view of the Internet and the World Wide Web as being totally non-profit, everything-for-free venues, to fade away. Hotwired introduced Web advertising on its site in October 1994, featuring ads from Sprint, Volvo, AT&T, MCI, Zima, and others; by the time consumers began surfing the Web with the brand-new Netscape 1.0 in November of the same year, Web ads were already a fact of life. Spam -- mass commercial emailings to legitimate mailing lists -- appeared en masse in December (though the first spam reference I can find is the infamous April '94 spamming from Canter and Siegel Legal Services). Affiliate marketing began in the same year, with PC Flowers and Gifts, Cybererotica, and others beating out better-known affiliate programs like Amazon.com to the Internet.

By 1996, tracking methodology had been implemented and was in use by such ad providers as ValueClick, Alexa, Be Free, LinkShare, and Commission Junction. Refer-it.com was launched in 1997 as an attempt to provide a centralized, detailed search function for affiliates. The idea was relatively straightforward: to reach out to as many Net consumers as possible, and somehow track their surfing and buying habits in order to fine-tune advertising tactics. Of course, the entire idea is predicated on invading Net users' privacy at least to some degree. "Cookies," designed as part of the original Netscape protocols, were implemented to store login information, track surfers' visits to commercial sites, and keep at least some record of personal and demographical information in order to assist sales and marketing tactics; ad banners were selected to target a site's demographics; and so forth.

The thinking isn't much different from the ideas driving mass postal mailings, catalog requests (why do you think they ask you for so much information for a simple catalog mailing?), telemarketing calls ("We see you're a satisfied customer of Foobar Corporation's MegaWidget, and as such, we'd like to introduce you to...") -- even television ads marketed to a channel's prime viewing audience (toys on Cartoon Network, shopping outlets on Lifetime, computer goodies on TechTV, etc.). All these advertising and marketing techniques are, by necessity, somewhat scattershot in approach and effectiveness, and the results bear this out. When a 1% "click-through" rate for banner ads is considered excellent, that says something. So the advertisers and the software designers decided to raise the bar a bit.

The idea of specifically targeted "adware" came about when the producers of freebie product found that they couldn't make money -- or enough money to suit their pocketbooks -- by simply giving their products away, or hoping that folks who signed up for their services would click on the ads that ran on their sites. Thus they began to bundle advertising within their wares. Suddenly Websites and software developers that prided themselves on being aggressively non-profit found themselves forced to accept advertising to stay afloat. Developers found themselves embracing, or at least accepting, the idea of modifying their programs with commercial content, requiring users to either accept ads along with the freebies or register the programs, usually for a fee, to obtain the ad-free versions. Of course it didn't end there. As Internet advertising showed itself to be a dicey-at-best proposition, the software used to promulgate advertising and encourage ecommerce on the Net became more and more sophisticated and, unfortunately, more intrusive.