A settlement between the FTC and Zango over Zango’s distribution methods of their adware was released today. The complaint can be found here.
According to the FTC complaint, Zango has been installed on U.S. consumers computers over 70 million times and has delivered over 6.9 billion pop ups.
The short story of the settlement is Zango has to pay $3M in fines over a 12 month period. This seems somewhat like chump change for what must have been made off of 6.9 billion pop ups. Zango also has to stop doing those bad installs and hard to do uninstalls. I could have sworn Zango has consistenly stated they’ve never engaged in such activities. They’ve just been providing a much wanted piece of software to consumers keeping the Internet free. Of course, the settlement does not mean Zango is agreeing to any wrong-doing on their part…yada yada legal stuff. Glad Zango got their wrist slapped and that’s what I see this as, a wrist slap. That’s better than nothing I suppose. Mean while their software will continue to provide a platform for this kind of stuff. But then the FTC isn’t addressing these types of issues arising from adware. For now it seems online adevertisng fraud is something we need to address within our own Industry
