Gray Areas in Privacy

Claria (formerly Gator) was one of the most notorious distributors of adware, littering consumer's PCs with programs to track their behavior and serve up ads that were distributed with free applications. Often users had no idea what was going on, and getting rid of their stuff could be frustrating. They've now announced that they are taking a new, above-board approach to their business, and the result is something called PersonalWeb.

From their site:

PersonalWeb is a Web personalization service that automatically creates a custom Home page for every user. By searching and surfing the Web just as you already do, you teach PersonalWeb about your interests. PersonalWeb builds a customized Home page just for you, with one-click access to the Web sites, services and other content you use most.

PersonalWeb even recommends new things related to your interests that you may not yet have discovered yourself. With PersonalWeb, every time you go online, you'll have easy access to your favorite parts of the Web — and more easily discover things that may become new favorites.

Which sounds nice, but there's one bit of information missing from the home page of the site: the detail that this is all going to be used to serve up ads based on your behavior. They aren't quite hiding that either; users who read everything on the download page will know this.

I can't point at this and call them bad guys; they are telling the consumer what the price of the software is, although they're not calling much attention to it. But there are some problems with this. What affect does the software have on the performance of a PC? Is it as easy to uninstall as they say?

The privacy policy posted on the site looks reasonable, though there is the caveat that if somebody buys the company, all bets are off.

A bigger question, I think, is whether consumers are comfortable downloading a piece of software from somebody they've probably never heard of. Claria seems to realize this; they've signed up Yahoo! Japan as a partner, with the idea that Yahoo! will distribute the software, probably bundled with a free application such as an instant messaging client or a toolbar.

I think that's the only way for this to work; people are a lot more likely to trust something like this if it's coming from a company they already know, such as Yahoo! or Google or AOL. Claria's rather chequered past doesn't help.

PersonalWeb was released in April; no word yet on how many people have actually downloaded it (and how many of them are actually using it). It will be interesting to see if they get any traction with consumers - or if this becomes something that has to be sneaked onto consumer's computers.