False Advertising

[evilbutterfly]

Let's say you're going to your favorite store, and outside the store you see that a 3rd-party company has set up a little booth. You walk up to the booth and see a big flashing neon sign that says "PUSH THIS BUTTON AND WIN A CAR!!" right above a little red button. You push the button, thinking, "What the hell, it's worth a shot." As soon as you push it, another sign comes up out of the booth. It reads "To redeem your prize, fill out these forms!" Coming out with this new sign are a series of forms. You fill them out, giving the booth your name, address, phone number, and various other pieces of personall information. You finish all the forms and return them to the booth, and nothing happens.

In the coming days, you receive endless amounts of junk mail, telemarketer phone calls, and other annoyances. Your friends also pushed the button and got nothing but harassment. You see other people push the button while you're going to the store, and nobody ever gets anything. You don't see any announcements in the paper or anywhere about people winning anything. You are very angry.

So what do you do? You sue the owner of the booth for false advertising. Turns out nobody won, or if anybody did the booth still didn't properly warn that there were very low chances of winning (as it was legally obligated to do). You win the suit and are compensated for the booth owner's sneaky behavior.


Now let's say you're on a website and see a flashing banner that says "CLICK ME AND WIN AN IPOD!!" You click it and it gives you all sorts of spyware and spams your inbox, may be even sends email to your friends automatically. You don't win an iPod, nobody else does either. So what do you do about it? Nothing.

Why doesn't everybody sue the hell out of these ad companies? They promise things and never deliver. Even if a few people win, the sites don't properly display the rules for winning and whatnot. They just have a bunch of ads, but no warnings. This is illegal and everybody knows it, but nobody does anything. Honestly, if people start filing lawsuits, may be the ad companies will be shut down and only good, wholesome ads (like Google's) will be displayed on sites.

So who else thinks we should sue the companies that produce these lying banners?

[Freak83]

RE: False Advertising

I'm not exactly an expert on this, but I imagine it would be very hard to track just who is in charge of these adds and who to sue for it. Also, sueing is not exactly a cheap thing to do, for both sides involved.

[Tasselfoot]

RE: False Advertising

Have you clicked on any of these before? I have, once. It puts you to something that if you buy something or somethings or get enough other people to buy things, THEN you get whatever gift was promised. Just like freeipods.com. So, once you go to the actual site, all the fine print is laid out. Hence, no false advertising, no breach of an implied contract, and no lawsuits.

[Tank101]

RE: False Advertising

I actually like this idea. But nobody will want to stand up and sue a random ad company for something that thousands of ad companies do.

EDIT: Tassel, he's talking about the banners that say "YOU ARE THE 1,000,000th PERSON TO VIEW THIS WEBSITE, CLICK HERE TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE." Then when you click there, it takes you to a place where there are more ads saying "ENTER FOR A CHANCE TO WIN A PRIZE!"

[Tasselfoot]

RE: False Advertising

Yea. I know what he's talking about... I only have one experience clicking on something like that, and it wanted me to try something or buy something... I forget. But, pretty sure it was legit to get the prize if you followed through all their deals.

Oh. I remember. It asked me about 20 questions, and then wanted me to subscribe to something... and then I'd get the prize. Never went that far, obviously. But, I'd be willing to bet the offer was legit after all that nonsense.

[Squeek]

RE: False Advertising

I suppose once I get a crap computer to play around with I will give this a shot to see if this is really what they are doing.

Hmm...seem's my sister's computer is due for a reformatting...

~Squeek

[MythamX]

I am a victim of this, I'm sorry to say. A pop-up appeared right where I was about to click, and BAM. My poor compy was turned to a spy/ad-ware paradise. I had to restart Windows and wipe my hard drive clean. It took me hours to repair all the damage. Since we can't sue them and get away with it, however, I have concocted a brilliant plan. Spy-ware designer genocide!

We track down the makers of all the spy-ware and ads/banners on the net, and publicly kill them. You'll just be walkin one day, see a guy you recognize from our hit-list, and just run up and kill him. The cops'll come and try to cuff' you, and you'll be like, "Hey, HEY! He was a spy-ware designer!" and the cops'll be like, "Oh, alright! Good job buddy!" And everyone will clap and you'll be a hero.

Anyway, the point being is that ads/banners suck, and there's no way to make them pay through the law, even on false advertising accounts. What you CAN do, is not be an idiot like me, and just NOT CLICK ON THE BANNERS!

[Squeek]

Opera has a wierd thing in it that almost makes me click banners sometimes.

Middle clicking to get the scroller enabled brings the cursor to the middle of the window. Middle click again to release and it's back to normal. Well, if you never intended to middle click and accidentally middle-clicked your way to the center of the page where an ad is while motioning to left-click, you'll hit it.

I've accidentally hit EB's AIM link twice now. Good thing it doesn't actually do anything.

~Squeek

[ToshX]

Why do people make this spyware anyway? So they can pester you about buying their products? Then you say ok, go out and buy their products, and find out who or what they are run by, they probably thought about this and knew they were going to get shut down in an instant. So what are they REALLY trying to do with your address? Send mail to your house for the hell of it? Steal your credit card number then go buy a 50 inch TV?

[Cenright]

I would rather create a virus that does nothing but installs certain sets of spyware, and find a way to dump it on company computers. Try to get a law-suit going then. "He did exactly what we do!!! But since we are a corp, we want to press charges."

[zajac]

I don't know... I'm kind of entertained by 'shooting the burglar and saving santa' or 'shooting the terrorist' or 'lasering the alien'... Hmmm... What's with al the violent ads nowadays? lol

[87x]

I don't really think it's false advertising because like Tass said, after you click the link your sent to another page with the fine print laid out. Now the problem comes if the Advertisees never had any real plans of giving away the prize they were advertising. Thats what you have to try and prove.

[Squeek]

Uh, they don't.

You fill out a form but all it does is send your information to a database for more bombardments. Soon comes e-mails flooding your inbox and even letters if you gave out your address. Worst of all, phone calls if you gave your number too. I wouldn't be surprised if they are in cahoots with telemarketers.

Anyway, I'll probably give this a shot sometime to see what happens. I'll clear all the spyware (all none of it) from my computer and leave some active ones (Microsoft anti-spyware) up to see what I can catch.

~Squeek

[ImEric12]

Yeah, just get Firefox, Microsoft Anti-Spyware, Ad-Aware, and Spybot: Search and Destroy and you shouldn't have to worry about much spyware.

And the standard court doesn't understand computer related issues, so just generally rules in favor of the corporation so they won't like stupid when they don't know what's going on. That's how it always works =\

[Tasselfoot]

And the standard court doesn't understand computer related issues, so just generally rules in favor of the corporation so they won't like stupid when they don't know what's going on. That's how it always works =\

Boy... you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Seriously, that statement is beyond idiocy. Please, be my guest and back it with actual court cases proving your point. What is that? You were high when you came up with that? There ARE no extremely biased court rulings like that that would throw our entire judicial system to the wolves? That is what I thought.

C'mon. If you're going to say a retarded comment against a branch of the government.... at least have some semblance of an idea as to what you're talking about.