Sears and Spyware
Harvard Business School’s Assistant Professor, Ben Edelman, recently levelled serious allegations against retail giant, Sears.
Edelman’s claim is substantiated by Sears’s own Privacy Statement. In this statement, they expressly inform the users that the user information form that customers fill in while registering will install a software in their computers that:
monitors all of the internet behavior that occurs on the computer on which you install the application, including…filling a shopping basket, completing an application form, or checking your…personal financial or health information
Any user clicking ‘I Agree’ to this policy will effectively clear Sears to plant the Comscore spying application in their computer.
One may ask why this is a problem if this snooping is mentioned in Sears’s privacy policy and the customer is agreeing to it. But therein lies the catch.
This statement is buried in page 10 of a 54 page document. How many customers will wait to read the document past page 5?
Edelman points out that Sears’s document does not meet the standards set by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He is especially caustic about the fact that Sears first identifies this spyware as VoiceFive and claims that it originates from a company named TMRG Inc. However, it can easily be unearthed that the software comes from Comscore.
[...] Shuts down part of site January 5, 2008 — asyan We had reported on Thursday about the Sears spyware scandal. Well, the saga continues today with Sears scrambling to make amends after their tryst with spyware [...]