Display pop up, immunity and legality

Since 1990, the Internet has developed so fast that changes were almost permanent, day after day, minute after minute. As the history of technology goes by, different means of communication go on to develop, grow and offer to the user, from time to time, new possibilities, new stuff, new potentials that permit them to make use of websites and the content they offer. And as the number of websites registered also grow very fast, new ways of advertising are created. At first, traditional ads published on papers and magazines were incorporated to the websites, with differential designs and layouts. But then, the display pop up came into history: a not-wanted ad, blockable by some anti-pop up programs (in general, not very effective, as pop ups are specially programmed to avoid these type of systems), is displayed in the screen without wanting it to do it. And also, most of the time the ads that appear are not of products that might be interesting for the user: they can be ads on everything, any product, such as live-chat, webcams, viagra, and so on. But what is the real market for display pop up ads? Most of the websites are now developing this new system for advertising, but the truth is that they are generally expensive for the enterprise that want to advertise. A very common example, that can be found in several websites, is Mercadolibre: you can find it in warez pages, in pages with adult content, and also in sport sites like www.universofutbol.com. Big enterprises like Mercado libre are capable of investing lots of money on this means of advertising.

But there are some discussions that can be put on the scene: isn’t the display pop up invasive? Is it allowed by law? Are there websites that ban the display pop up? Well, as for the first question, we should say, yes, pop up advertising is invasive, as it is triggered without your request and without your knowledge. Sometimes, even if you close the pop up, a new window is opened, and you are redirected to another website which you would have never intended to visit. As for the legal issues that we should need to analyze, there is a legal vacuum on this. There are no specific details that tell how display pop up should be treated in the terms of the law. Some sites like Google have taken, as a politic, the measure to ban pop up ads, so as to make the users a more comforting experience when surfing around the Internet.

An interesting article published in the Washington Post can enlighten some of these aspects that we are taking into account. This article, by William Jackson, informs about a recent federal court that declared pop-up ads legal and inevitable. “We computer users must endure pop-up advertising along with her ugly brother, unsolicited bulk e-mail, as a burden of using the Internet,” wrote Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. With this decision, discussions and debate were raised, as for some users think display pop ups restrain their freedom.

NielsenNetRatings, as related in the article mentioned, shows us the tremendous figures: in july 2003 seven million thousand pop ups were set up in that month, three times more than july 2002.

As we said before, there are products that claim to eliminate and kill display pop ups, like Absoluteshield and Zero popup, but most of the time they are not that accurate and efective. This happens, actually, because only a few amount of pop-ups comes from the site you are visiting. 80 percent of display pop ups are the work of adware and spyware,

small programs, legal or illicit but almost always covert, that deliver third-party ads. They are often downloaded along with other software, without being noticed, such as peer-to-peer file sharing programs and e-mail customizing software.

even though it is difficult to cope with pop up ads, there is a program that has been developed with quite good results: Stopzilla, an engine that dedicates more to block the display pop up than to eliminate it. First of all, because the program that triggers adware doesn’t remove the adware itself, and having it extracted is extremely difficult, as the program is capable of reinstalling itself.

In conclusion, coping with display pop up advertising is a very difficult task as it does not depend usually on the user. What we can recommend from here, as a paliative, is to be careful with files downloaded, specially with certain sites in which we have to pay for subscription or enter our credit card number. Massive sites, websites in which thousands of miles of users enter every minute, trigger this forms of advertising because they represent a huge amount of money for their earnings. That is why the developments of pop ups is so widespread: they are an immune system, in which the user doesn´t have any govern: everything can be done without their consent, without the user wanting to display those pop ups. As the history of technology goes by, the only option that we seem to be able to tackle with is dealing in a better form with the internet.