The Gator Corporation tried to shake the ThiefWare stigma associated with them in the early 2000 decade so as to attract unsuspecting advertisers who might be fooled into advertising with them — hence the name change to Claria. As an advertiser, don't be fooled as to where Claria's roots are. Even though they have shed their thiefware practices, should we just forget all the bad that they have unleashed upon past businesses and affiliates? We think not.

Claria = Gator = GAIN (all share the ThiefWare heritage).

For a while some sites employed ActiveX controls to install Claria's software. We are not quite sure who developed this method of installing Gator, but it benefitted Claria. Many users got stuck with a program they didn't even know was being installed on their computers via these ActiveX programs. ActiveX is usually by default set to execute on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Be sure to check the MSIE ActiveX settings page to disable ActiveX. Many people had their computer's hijacked in this manner.

While a user's computer was talking to Claria's servers, we did not know what information was actually being transmitted from the user's computer to Claria. Gator tracked the surfer's surfing habits, but to what extent we do not know.

Gator supposedly had told these sites to use a modified ActiveX method that was designed to alert the user of the download whether or not they have low security settings set on MSIE. Gator told ThiefWare.com that they used a popunder to alert the user. We wondered why they didn't use a popup so that the user knew right away they were getting software downloaded. The representative also said that when Gator ran at computer boot-up, it would notify the user that Gator was running.

Because it seemed difficult to manually find and erase all traces of Gator's ad delivery mechanism, we recommend that you get a spyware remover application. A good spyware program will remove all programs and registry keys belonging to Gator and Offer Companion (ad delivery component).

Ultimately we believe that some of the methods that have been used to install Gator were deceptive or unclear to users. We found that many users did not completely understand how they were being monitored for ad delivery either.

The confusion was due to the very lengthy EULA from Claria that attempted to cover every sort of legality and function of Gator in very long-winded paragraphs. If people had short plain english explanations written for them at the 8th grade level, much of the confusion of what that program did would have gone away and we would have seen more people removing Gator from their computers.

Many people that did deliberately download Gator only understood that they would get ads delivered in exchange for use of the application. The user might also understand that their surfing habits were being watched. But, many users did not realize how damaging it could be to the sites that got Gator'd.

These site owners had not given Gator permission to display ads over their sites. The site owners received no ad revenue from Claria which made Claria a parasite of the Web site, all at the Web site owner's expense. It put the victim Web site at an unfair disadvantage for visibility

Gator's original purpose might have been nobel before they started contextually targeting Web sites with ads. If you want a program to do what Gator did (not the ad pop-up function, but the form filling feature), we have a much better ThiefWare free alternative. If you have (or had) Gator and are using the form filling feature, do not yet delete it before reading on...
 

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