Hurrah for Seattle - Down with idiotic ads

Remove all ads!

According to Infoworld, a company selling a spyware/adware/whatnot protection program has been forced to pay money in settlement after being sued for inducing Internet users to believe that they had spyware on their computer whereas no detection had been performed. That and some fear-inducing gibberish. All in all, the fun has ended for them. Clicky. IMHO it should be a criminal offence to lie in advertisements, anyway.

 

AFAIK, it IS illegal to lie in an advertisement. The charges is, appropriately enough, false advertising. However, while we have the FCC that does a pretty good job at watching out for things on radio and TV ads, they don't seem to do a very good job with the internet.

Then again, this is an example of just flat-out lying, and not really false advertising. False advertising is when you say your product does something, when it in fact does not do it. So maybe there does need to be some improvement in the law. Then again, they are saying that their product detected spyware on your computer when it didn't - so that would fall under the law of making a false claim about your product.

Another example that I find to be tantamount to lying is the web service called "FreeCreditReport.com". They are so popular that they even advertise on TV. Upon seeing that name, the natural supposition one would make is you can log on to that site and get a free copy of your credit report. Well, it doesn't really work that way. They will provide you with a free credit report - on the condition that you sign up with their credit monitoring service at the cost of about $20 per month. That definitely seems to be blurring the line of truth to me. It's free - if you're willing to pay for something else. To me, that makes it not free.

 

I have not seen the specific ad in question but that type of ad always seems to sneak in a weasel word so that if you read the warning closely it actually says that you "might" have spyware on your computer.

I am not saying that I like that type of advertising, it exists solely to take advantage of the fear and ignorance of the majority of computer users, but I don't think I would go so far to say that it is false advertising.

 

One question - how or why do mcdonalds and other tacky 'restaurants' get away with their misleading advertisements? Their posters show huge juicy burgers, but thats not what you get.

 

Well, Cuchulainn - I can tell you how they can get away with saying their 'burgers' are made with 100% Beef™.

"100% Beef™" is the name of the company that supplies them their 'meat' or cardboard/sawdust/ground cartilage/etc.

 

That's why the english needs to make a distinction between free (as in no strings attached, no requirements need to be met exept perhaps to get the free thing), and cost-free (as in the example above: you need to do something to recieve that extra "reward"). In Swedish we have the words "gratis" (free as explained above), and "kostnadsfri" (cost-free as above). There has been a few cases in Sweden where someone has used the word "gratis" instead of "kostnadsfri" in their advertisements, and suffered legal consequenses because of it.

[ December 15, 2006, 22:13: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

We could call it 'deliberately deceptive' advertising and split the difference