Microsoft buys Spyware company, takes it off it's Antispyware list

[jsteph]

The below:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1834607,00.asp

I think this falls under an 'ethics' issue. MS buys claria, a known and rather insidious spyware (excuse the redundancy) company, and then removes it from their MS AntiSpyware detection list.

I'm sure nobody's surprised, but I wonder if the 'MS can do no wrong' contingent will admit this is at least a little underhanded?
--Jim

 

[chiph]

Microsoft is now denying that they did this.

It comes down to: Who do you trust?

Chip H.


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[jsteph]

It comes down to: Who do you trust?

And the answer usually falls down party lines.
I wasn't aware that MS denied this, but judging from the article, it seems pretty straightforward--the default is 'ignore'.

Any MS AntiSpyware users here that can confirm whether the latest build of this tool indeed is defaulted to ignore claria?

Or maybe MS's denial is Clintionan:
"The accusations that we 'set the default behavior to ignore on the week in which we were accquiring Claria are not true'. (We did it 2 weeks before)"
--Jim

 

[jrbarnett]

The likelihood of this is to have mass abandonment of the MS Antisypware application, as Lavasoft had with Ad-Aware when it was announced they were de-listing When-U.

John

 

[skiflyer]

This is a tough one, my gut is to say what a crock, they delisted them.

But then thinking of the scale of the project it's possible in my mind that they have an automated feedback agent which delists programs if everyone checks ignore after it shows up marked for fixing... i.e. if the users say keep it despite the program maybe the program eventually changes it's defaults? I dunno how it works, but I'm willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt on this one, and I don't usually give them the benefit of anything.

 

[pmonett]

I have just gone through a reinstall of my XP system. I had intended to also reinstall MS AntiSpyware (I found the beta rather promising), but now I'll choose another supplier for my protection.

Pascal.

 

[lullysing]

myself lately i've been a big fan of scanning using 2 antispyware apps ( spybot and adaware) and also doing the random check with the ultimate antispyware powertool : hijackthis!

Funny story : my roomie ( who doesn't have a computer, and that i let use mine on a limited account) actually destroyed network connectivity(ok, so he killed the DNs list) when he used hijackthis and flushed everything it detected. Quite funny, and it made him fear me and my "software powertools".

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