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| Microsoft's New "Adware" Patent Disturbing |
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| Tuesday, 17 July 2007 | |||||||||||||
 As publishers who rely on advertising to survive it would be remiss of us to fail to remind our readers that advertising in and of itself isn't an "evil" concept. What is continually disturbing is the application of "adware" as a supposedly legitimate advertising methodology. In reality most "adware" is just mildly annoying and generally involves trading the same sort of personal information you often trade willingly in retail stores (if you've *ever* used a "Bonus Card" in a retail store to get special prices, you've submitted to exactly the same sort of information gathering done by "adware"). In advertising, you decide where to "draw the line" when it comes to your customers. In our case, for instance, we've avoided things like pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, and using mailing lists because we think such things are annoying and go too far. Microsoft seems to be extending the definition of exactly what "too far" may be in a patent application filed June 5th. The patent is for garnering "contextual" data from your local machine, applications, software, and files. To say this is an order of magnitude greater intrusion than garnering data from your browsing habits is a bit of an understatement we think. Information Week Reports.... In two patent applications filed this month, Microsoft may be foreshadowing future Windows features, including updates to the taskbar and ad-supported versions. The first patent application, filed on July 5, details advertising software that uses applications and data on a computer, rather than the Web, to provide context for and trigger advertising. "Web-based advertising is limited to targeting based on a user's interaction with a webpage or search application in communication with a portal or search engine," the patent application notes. Overall, the software is like adware that figures out what ads to display based on files on the hard drive and what's being displayed on the screen at a given moment. The advertising software, which could be part of the operating system, a standalone app, or an application feature, would use information gleaned from documents, music, computer status messages, and e-mails as context for ads. However, the software could conceivably gather information on every file on a user's hard drive and send it to advertisers, and the application does little to assuage security and privacy concerns. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           
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