U.S. Federal Trade Commission sanctioned a site advertising itself as the world's biggest sex and swingers community for exposing consumers to unrequested sexually explicit pop-up ads.
As FTC reported, legal charges were pressed against the owners of AdultFriendFinder.com for using spyware most of the time installed without consumers' consent, to get their ads through. There were complaints from people who had never even visited sites with sexual content and who were all of a sudden confronted with full-screen pornographic ads after typing terms with no sexual connotation into search engines.
The parts have reached an agreement as the site's operator, Various Inc. of Palo Alto, California agreed not to carry on with his marketing methods and ask for consumers’ consent before ads are put on view.
The terms of the settlement exclude any fines imposed to Various Inc and other Web sites, such as Cams.com, Passion.com, and NudeCards.com, as FTC cannot take such measures on first-time violations of this law.
Ben Edelman, Harvard Business School assistant professor and spyware researcher addressed the problem of unwanted pornographic ads back in 2006 and explained how ad networks failed to assume responsibility for spyware due to the dissemination methods of this and thus to the ease with which they can blame each other for having implied that users wanted such content.
