A cold lonely summer for NebuAd
NebuAd, the company accused of wiretapping, forgery and browser hijacking by a Free Press report, has just lost their CEO, Robert Dykes. Sources report that the company has also laid off a significant number of employees. What happened to NebuAd? I remember them a year or so ago at one of my conferences — they had a booth and the promise of their software was quite innocent: they wanted to help ISPs deliver better targeted advertising, more relevant, less intrusive. For example, if you are a wireless ISP and want to offer free Wi-Fi in exchange for your users agreeing to view ads, NebuAd would watch the pages visited by the user (without getting any of the user’s personal information) and based on the websites you are looking at, they put in more relevant ads.
Sounds pretty good and quite innocent to me, until this report by Robert Topolski (“NebuAd and Partner ISPs: Wiretapping, Forgery and Browser Hijacking,”) which says that NebuAd “monitors, intercepts and modifies the contents of Internet packets” as people go online and “commandeers users’ Web browsers” to load tracking cookies and collects information from users in order to place ads from ISPs. Neither the users nor the web sites know that NebuAd is intercepting and modifying. Topolski found that NebuAd, after being installed on the WOW! network, injects extra hidden code into a user’s browser that was not sent by the Web site being visited. That code directs the user’s Web browser to another site not requested or even seen by the consumer, where hidden code is downloaded and executed to add more tracking cookies. The consumer then sees ads based on NebuAd’s profile of a user’s browsing habits — built through the secretly collected information (from Public Knowledge).
The revelations triggered a public outcry, resulting in Congressional scrutiny of the practices of companies like NebuAd and Phorm. Invading people’s privacy is, as they’ve now found, not such a good business after all.
Related posts:
Loading ...
