• by Ross Fadner , December 10, 2004

The Claria Corporation is planning to chop its end-user license agreement in half, from nearly 6,000 words to around 2,500 words, D. Reed Freeman, the company's chief privacy officer, told MDN Thursday.

The new agreement is expected to roll out on a test basis within the next few days, said Claria's chief marketing officer Scott Eagle.

Freeman said the move is in response to pressure from consumer advocacy groups who, for about the last year, have been critical of lengthy license agreements. "It seems, with the pendulum swinging back, one way to make the EULAs [end-user license agreements] more transparent to consumers is to make them shorter," he said.

Freeman, a lawyer and former staff attorney for the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said that the company's main concern is that its 40 million consumer users understand that they'll be receiving ads after downloading Claria's adware program. "The world is moving towards transparency and control," he said.

But to some consumer advocates, any transparency and control problems won't be solved by editing the license agreement. Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that when it comes to adware, "notices are basically irrelevant," because consumers have no ability to bargain over the terms. Hoofnagle also said that his organization receives complaints from consumers who didn't know the software was present -- in some cases, because it was downloaded by a child.

Typically, consumers receive ads served by Claria after downloading a free version of a software program such as Kazaa. "The proposition is: free software in exchange for receiving advertising," said Freeman.

Through its license agreement, Claria authorizes removal of its ad-serving software, called GAIN, through the Windows add/remove program. Freeman said that consumers who have tried to remove the software through other programs have run into trouble -- often because the programs didn't completely remove GAIN, or because they removed other software as well. "We have found that a number of these tools result in a very poor consumer experience."

In some cases, said Freeman, software also purports to remove only GAIN, while leaving in place programs such as Kazaa -- which means consumers then get free Kazaa without ads.

Freeman said that Claria currently is in discussions with the companies who provide the removal software. When asked whether Claria is considering legal action against the companies, he responded with a terse, "No comment."

One way Claria intends to shorten its license agreement is by deleting a clause prohibiting consumers from using packet sniffers to monitor data transmissions between their computer and Claria's servers. Packet sniffers are network monitors that inspect and report such transmissions from a local network to the Internet. Eagle said the decision to remove the clause was made months ago.