According to a report prepared by Harvard Law student Benjamin Edelman, if you use Gator, now owned by Claria, you may be in a bit of a bind if you want to remove the GAIN (Gator Advertising Information Network) adware which has been installed on your computer by the Gator software.
According to Claria itself, more than 35 million users have the GAIN adware installed on their systems, although PC Pitstop says that only a very small minority of those 35 million actually knowingly agreed to the adware being installed.
However, the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) which you would have signed when downloading and installing Gator says, buried way towards the bottom, that you agree that “you will not use, or encourage others to use, any unauthorized means for the removal of the GAIN Adserver, or any GAIN-supported software from a computer.”
Following a proffered link takes the user to a section where one can learn the authorized means for removing the adware: “If you decide you don’t want GAIN-Supported Software, you can easily remove them through the Add/Remove Programs menu in your Microsoft Windows control panel.”
In otherwords, the only authorized method for removing the GAIN adware installed by Gator is through the Windows Add/Remove Programs interface.
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The problem with this, according to Edelman, is that it is often difficult to find the Gator/Claria entries, as they are not clearly identifed. Instead, say Edeman, “users are required to identify, find and remove all programs that bundle Gator, and only then is Gator’s software designed to uninstall.” To which he added that the “unusual removal procedure–unique among all programs I’ve ever encountered–makes Gator difficult for users to remove.”
And Edelman ought to know. An acknowledged spyware expert, Edelman has been an expert witness in several lawsuits against spyware companies.
In fact, Claria is purportedly in the middle of two lawsuits against anti-spyware companies, one of them the aforementioned PC Pitstop. This strikes Aunty as not unlike the spammers suing the anti-spam companies. There is just no winning this one, guys. Even if you “win”, the goodwill you will lose in the marketplace ensures it to be a Pyrrhic victory at best.
You can read more about this at PC PitStop.
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