One of the problems with the spyware fight is it's often very hard for those who don't look closely to tell the good guys from the bad guys. That's the mistake recently made by accounting giant Ernst & Young in bestowing one of its regional "Entrepreneur of The Year" awards to a certain hustling enterprise called Freeze.com.
That Freeze.com might not be the most appropriate recipient of the E-Business Entrepreneur of The Year 2006 for the Minnesota/Dakota region was, as near as I can tell, first pointed out by the McAfee SiteAdvisor blog. (SiteAdvisor is a project, recently acquired by McAfee, that tests e-commerce websites for spyware, spam, and identity theft scams.) The Freeze.com website is one of those that provides unsuspecting users with free screensavers and the like but at the cost, as SiteAdvisor's testing showed, of having a variety of adware/spyware programs bundled on your computer and your e-mail address and possibly other information turned over to the spammers.
"McAfee SiteAdvisor rates Freeze.com red, because when we entered a unique e-mail address on the site, we received an overwhelming 94 spammy e-mails per week," the SiteAdvisor blogger wrote. "When we downloaded Freeze's Living Marine Aquarium 2 screensaver, we were required to register our e-mail address in order to become a Freeze member. Once we had registered, we were prompted to fill out a list of questions styled as a survey. But the 'survey' is really a gateway to Freeze's advertising offers. Each survey question is strategically written to increase the chance that users will answer 'Yes'; for example: 'Do you think you should be paid more?' and 'Do you enjoy listening to music?' Each time we clicked 'Yes', we received a solicitation from one of Freeze's advertisers. And, as Freeze's privacy policy explains, information shared on Freeze's Web site, including e-mail addresses, 'may be shared with affiliates and trusted business partners.' A few hundred e-mails later, we think most users will consider this a remarkably bad deal."
It's perhaps not surprising that, as SiteAdvisor points out, Ernst & Young might find it difficult to tell the difference in entrepreneurial merits between a Freeze.com and a Webroot, a real anti-spyware vendor which won an Entrepreneur of The Year award last year. After all, from an accounting firm's point of view, they're both fast-growing Internet businesses. The fact that one is helping its customers and the cause of Internet security in general while the other is victimizing its customers and poisoning the well for all Internet users is just one of those little details that may not show up in the beancounter's books.
Still, it would be nice if Ernst & Young figures out the difference at least in this case fairly quickly. By winning this regional award, Freeze.com is now eligible to win the overall national Entrepreneur of The Year award competition later this year. And were it to win that, it would then be entered in the international competition to be held in Monte Carlo. Somewhere along the line, let's hope Freeze.com does face an accounting from someone who can tell the good guys from the spyware and spam purveyors.
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