Watch Where Your Name Goes

A recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that ads from fairly reputable companies - Netflix, eHarmony, Club Med, and others - are being distributed via adware, software that installs itself on your computer and often causes all kinds of problems, and the advertisers aren't doing much about it. (Other advertisers, including Dell and AOL, are praised in the report for dealing with problem much better.)

The problem is that advertisers don't place all those ads themselves; big advertisers farm things out to ad brokers and online advertising companies that may or may not be doing things properly.

Ultimately, though, that doesn't matter - from the point of view of a user who got some kind of nasty adware on their machine because of a Netflix ad, it's Netflix who's the villain.

The comments from the Keith Smith, the CEO of 180solutions.com, one of the companies that plants this stuff on consumers' PCs, are fascination. They appear to be one of these outfits that gets your permission to put stuff on your machine by burying the details in copy that most people won't ever find or read.

The report found that advertisers sometimes are unaware that their ads have been installed with software. But Keith Smith, 180Solutions' chief executive, said his company explicitly tells consumers that its free software contains advertisements.

"We object to the overall premise that consumers are duped into installing our software," Smith said. "It's no different from what's on television. People are paying for this content by agreeing to some ads."

His company's web site is equally fascinating.

180solutions is about giving users a free content experience on the Internet, while at the same time fueling an economy where content creators, web publishers and advertisers of any size can make money with time-shifted paid search.

Through 180solutions' programs, consumers gain free access to a large catalog of entertaining and informative content sponsored by time-shifted paid search. Our applications offer web publishers and content creators a legitimate and flexible means to monetize all types of content, including games and videos, and advertisers increase their reach with new and highly targeted inventory.

First of all, anyone who uses the word "monetize" is shady in my opinion. The site talks at great length about "time-shifted paid search" but never explains what that is. A Google search on the term produces no illumination. My guess - and I'll have to go with my guess, because 180solutions has declined to explain what they're doing - is that "time-shifted paid search" means putting some software on your machine that does some kind of searching on its own as a means of manipulating search engine results for their clients. In other words, they simultaneously place annoying ads, screw with people's computers, and manipulate search engines, making them less useful for users. Nice business.

I could be wrong, but since the company doesn't explain what they do, there's no way to know. (If anyone from the company would care to explain, I'll write about it here.)