Project Business Ethics

What else can these programs do?

Unfortunately programs like Godzilla and Lime Wire, Mesh, Kazak along with most file-sharing apps, also install several adware applications to finance its development including TopText and Gator, Cydoor, and BonziBuddy.

Several of these adware and spy ware marketers have been raising a lot of eyebrows within the internet community. EZula, TopText, Surf Plus, and Gator have all come under criticism for unethical advertising and marketing practices.

For you consumers out there I would like to throw out a few added comments about Gator's capabilities. Some of you might have seen the ads for this product which is advertised as a personal utility program to assist you in managing your personal information, banking records, credit card account numbers, passwords and other vital information and can process forms on your behalf while shopping on online -- sounds great -- if all the personal information it held was maintained and remained securely on your personal computer, but all of it does not and much of it gets included in the data stream to Gator's headquarters where it can be sold to third parties.

One highly malicious program has the ability to uninstall and remove a highly praised and effective program called Ad-Aware by Lava Soft that many thousands of consumers use to protect their computers.

Gator is currently coming under a lot of scrutiny because of its unethical advertising practices where by they literally switch authorized paid advertising on web sites and replace them with ads of their clients and do not pay the web site owners or the original sponsored advertisers a dime. Now I ask you is this the type of company you want crawling around inside of your computers let alone trust with your bank account records and passwords! There have been a number of reports of security concerns due to a back door trojan  that Gator installs and Broadband DSLReports > reports that Gator can also be installed by visiting websites that have chosen to be paid by Gator to include the installer links in their pages.

You will also find a lot of information on our site in our Web Masters Section > about a company called eZula which is also distributing freeware to unsuspecting people which includes "smartlinks" plug-ins that work within the IE browser. These plug ins enable the viewing of specially highlighted links which eZula uses to misdirect consumers to their paying clients, however like Gator, they are the only ones making money off these links which are stealing web traffic right off the surface of unsuspecting web sites. eZula's rival in this regard  has currently stopped broadcasting it's "smartlinks" which were known to link to active pornographic sites and other inappropriate materials by linking to innocent words and legitimate hyperlinks all over the internet. In fact, at one point the Disney web sites were under attacked by theses links which were leading children to pornography!