Internet marketing firm Intermix Media, which runs MySpace.com, was hit with a lawsuit by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer Thursday, blaming the company for installing spyware.
The suit accuses the Los Angeles-based company with redirecting computer users to websites where ads get displayed, adding unnecessary toolbars to browsers and delivering unwanted pop-up ads.
This follows a six-month investigation by the attorney general’s office that found Intermix responsible for installing advertising software on 3.7 million computers in New York alone, Spitzer said.
Intermix denied the claims.
“Intermix does not promote or condone spyware and remains committed to putting this legacy issue behind it as soon as practical. We expect to continue our discussions with the New York Attorney General’s Office and are still hopeful of reaching an appropriate and amicable resolution. Many of the practices being challenged were instituted under prior leadership and Intermix has been voluntarily and proactively improving these applications and related consumer disclosure and functionality for some time,” Christopher Lipp, senior vice president and general counsel for Intermix, said in a statement.
In question are redirect and toolbar applications that Intermix distributed together with screensavers, wallpaper, and cursors. The company claims to have begun scaling back this part of its business in November of 2004 and to have ceased distribution of the applications entirely on April 14.
Furthermore, Lipp said the applications do not collect user’s personal information.
However, at the core of the suit is Spitzer’s charge that the applications arrived unbeknownst to most consumers, omitted un-install applications, and could not be removed by user’s ad/remove function, all claims which Intermix denies.
“We are looking across the industry at these practices because it really does go to the core of e-commerce,” Kenneth Dreifach, chief of Spitzer’s Internet Bureau, told USA Today. “Increasingly, people don’t feel in control.”
