14 DAY TRIAL // The adware producing companies are not breaking any law, a United States court announced, despite the fact that these companies are using the web address of a store to send coupons and other unwanted advertising messages to Internet surfers.
We all agree that spyware causes damages and it's immoral. No one thinks that installing programs without the user's knowledge that spy and transmit all the information to a place where all the data is processed and used to place expensive international calls or to steal personal information.
Actually, the large companies have launched a full scale attack against spyware which jeopardizes the Internet surfers' safety. However, if the level of threat decreases a bit, everybody relaxes, because after all violating principles is ok as long as the banking accounts are safe.
Adware is rated as the "smaller evil", and these programs spy on the user with the sole purpose of sending (obviously unwanted) messages which match the users' preferences. Did I mention that they spy on you? In other words, they do exactly what spyware does, but this time no one criticizes the barbaric privacy violation. Why? Just because it doesn't steal the money from your account or extra-charge your phone bill.
Therefore, intimacy is not so important, or at least that's the conclusion we can draw from the court's decision. Not even the fact that these programs are slowing down your computer doesn't seem to matter too much, not to mention that the complete removal of spam from one's computer is difficult to achieve task doesn't seem to impress the court.
And the argument used by adware producers to defend their "creations" is that they only provide a "smart advertising" concept. Actually, these producers have summoned several times anti-virus companies not to rate adware and spyware in the same way and not to talk about adware products as being dangerous.