Legal and Ethical Issues Concerning Internet Marketing

Hello All,

I know that this does not concern the upcoming 08 election, but as mentioned previously this blog is also a project for my Internet Marketing class and I am getting graded on it so.. I have to post 4 articles related to legal and ethical issues concerning internet marketing and I found an article on NYTimes.com related to that topic published on October 13, 2004 by Tom Zeller.

The article is entitled, F.T.C. Files First Lawsuit Against Spyware -- which, obviously, has to do the the FTC handling spyware over the internet. Spyware is not only an annoyance to the average internet user, many feel as though spyware is a violation of privacy.

This article is dated, however, it provides insight into when the FTC first began to take notice of the spyware problem plagueing internet users everywhere. The FTC filed a lawsuit in New Hampshire against the CEO of Smartbot.com, citing that this company, in using spyware, was violating federal law. The FTC asserted that the use of spyware, tracking the websites an internet user visits and, consequently, bombarding them with pop up advertisements, is an "unfair and deceptive use of commerce."

he Federal Trade Commission formally announced yesterday its first assault against spyware - bits of computer code that surreptitiously install themselves on the computers of Internet users to track their activities, push them to Web sites, barrage them with advertisements, and otherwise wreak havoc with their machines.

The commission filed a lawsuit in a federal court in New Hampshire last week against Sanford Wallace, the owner of Seismic Entertainment Productions and Smartbot.net, contending that Mr. Wallace and his companies had violated federal law, which prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce."

The director of the commision of consumer protection, Lydia Parnes, claimed that this would not be the last of many lawsuits concerning companies who installed spyware to oblivious internet users.

Spyware is a problem amongst internet users even in 2008, four years after this article was published. It is hard to control because many companies choose to take advantages of the weaknesses in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the most widely used browser, and install spyware. The legality and ethics of Spyware is still widely debated to this day.