Research on WhenU: Privacy Policy Violations, Search Engine Cloaking, More...

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ben Edelman <edelman () law harvard edu>
Date: May 24, 2004 4:04:23 PM EDT
To: daåve () farber net
Subject: Research on WhenU: Privacy Policy Violations, Search Engine Cloaking, More...

Dave, 

Your readers might be interested in my ongoing research about WhenU.  

(Recall that WhenU makes controversial advertisement-display software that
has been the subject of considerable litigation.  Full disclosure: I've had
the privilege to serve as an expert in some of this litigation.)


1) Privacy policy violation: Installers for major WhenU programs prominently
claim that WhenU software "doesn't collect or send your browsing activity
anywhere."  Until this past weekend, WhenU's privacy policy said roughly the
same.  (In response to my posting of this research, WhenU has changed its
web site, though not its installers or the privacy policies they include.)
As it turns out, WhenU's claims are false: Whenever WhenU shows a user an
ad, it sends its servers which URL the user had been visiting.  My write-up
documents this privacy policy violation with screen-shots, HTTP logs, and an
analysis of WhenU's response.

WhenU Violates Own Privacy Policy
<http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/whenu-privacy>


2) "Cloaking" web sites for improved search engine rankings.  For at least
the past six months, and seemingly considerably longer, WhenU operated (or
hired an SEO to operate) a web of bogus web sites -- mixing text about WhenU
with gibberish and text copied from elsewhere, registered with false Whois
data, etc. -- in a scheme to boost the availability of articles favorable to
WhenU at the expense of critics.  When users clicked from search engine
results to view these pages, WhenU's web servers redirected users to other
sites -- articles touting WhenU's benefits.  In response to this behavior,
Google and Yahoo removed WhenU from their indexes.

WhenU Spams Google, Breaks Google "No Cloaking" Rules
<http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/whenu-spam>


3) In a further attempt to boost availability of content favorable to WhenU,
WhenU copied more than two dozen copyright-protected news articles to twelve
different WhenU web sites.  All article copies lacked statements of
copyright or of authorization to reproduce, and at least one published has
already confirmed that the copies were unauthorized.  The result was that
these pro-WhenU articles appeared in search results, even when publishers
specifically designed their sites to exclude search engine spiders.  In
response to my documentation of this behavior, WhenU pulled the article
copies from its web sites, but I kept screen-shots.

WhenU Copies 26+ Articles from 20+ News Sites
<http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/whenu-copy>


Benjamin Edelman
http://www.benedelman.org