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AOL beaten up for not respecting customers (again)
7 commentsAOL is a company that's refusing to learn it's lesson. In case you've been out of the loop for the last three weeks, AOL made front page news by exposing the search records of over half a million of their cusotmers in a very poorly anonymized fashion. Now they're upgrading their customers to AOL 9.0, which the site StopBadware.org is citing as a security concern due to the number of additional programs it installs along with it's own installation.
StopBadware isn't listing AOL 9.0 as malware, but they are stating that AOL's installation does follow a number of characteristics similar to malware: it installs additional software without warning the user, it installs toolbars without notifying the user, it installs shortcuts without notifying the user and it automatically updates the software without notifying the user. There seems to be a theme here, all this is going on behind the scenes without the user being notified.
Companies like AOL have to learn that our computers are exactly that: ours. We are the one's who should be controlling what goes on the computer, not them. By installing unknown software and not disclosing exactly what they are installing on the system, AOL is placing themselves in a questionable category that's not that far removed from being a trojan, just like the bad guys. Show your users at least a little respect and tell them exactly what you're going to do, why you're doing it and how it's going to benefit them. Don't just install a bunch of extra software on our computers and expect us to live with it.
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