Claria Swears It's Going Straight

Overhype

from the we-mean-it,-really dept

A couple weeks ago, Claria said it was going straight and giving up the adware business in favor of a new product that builds a personalized home page for users based on their surfing history, or, as SiliconBeat puts it, “leveraging traffic-snooping expertise”. The company is certainly working hard to give the impression that they’ve changed their stripes, but, as some critics are noting, many people are unlikely to be comfortable with having something monitor everything they surf, even if Claria says it doesn’t track users’ personal information — and they may be doubly shy of letting Claria do it, given the company’s past. Perhaps a bigger question, though, is will the product succeed? Asking users to keep an application running just to serve them up a personalized home page doesn’t seem like a great tradeoff, while there’s little evidence that surfing behavior is actually a better criteria with which to set up a personalized page than simply letting users choose the content they want.