Microsoft Clears Air on Claria in Anti-Spyware Application
Microsoft has a weird problem at its hand. Rumors on one hand claims that the company is seriously considering to acquire the Claria company which specializes in displaying advertisement as per the surfing habits of a user and is mostly known for their reportedly Spyware Gator application. Most executives in this company are against this move looking at the criticism Claria has received from public and news media.
And some days back, it was reported that one of the updates of the popular Microsoft application MS Anti-Spyware Beta lowered the risk rating assigned to some of the applications developed by Claria. This further fueled the rumors about Microsoft’s interests in Claria. However, Microsoft has now come up with a reply to all these speculation going on in the market.
Microsoft says in its statement: “Microsoft offers all software companies the opportunity to request a review of how Microsoft classifies their products through our vendor dispute process. In January, Claria filed a request for Microsoft to reevaluate some of its products. Upon review of their software against our criteria, we determined that continued detection of Claria’s products was indeed appropriate. We also decided that adjustments should be made to the classification of Claria software in order to be fair and consistent with how Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) handles similar software from other vendors. At the end of March, we communicated to Claria the result of our analysis through our standard process.”
Looks fair enough, but ignore is not exactly a very good setting for applications from companies with such a bad reputation in the market.
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Sushubh Mittal is the Tech Columnist at Search Engine Journal plus the Editor of TechWhack.
