McAfee uses adware to defeat adware?

Here is a great example of a corporation's left hand having no idea what it's right hand is doing. It is a simple problem that could easily have been resolved before it ever went to production by someone in the marketing/advertising chain (marketing department, advertising agency or online agency) to simply think about what they were doing and say "Hmm, maybe this is not such a great idea" Just goes to show that when advertising dollars are involved, the folks involved in this process are just like lemmings blindly following and not raising objections that will save their clients potential embarrasment to the brand.

Fighting Adware with....adware

Picture this: A drug company hits you over the head and then offers to sell you a bandage. Some say that's what Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee Inc., maker of popular antispyware software, has done – albeit unwittingly, the company asserts.

"We had no idea that commercials were appearing as adware," said Joe Telafichi, director of operations for McAfee AVERT Labs. "The difficulty is that one contracts with an advertising agency, who then subcontracts with online agency and so on."

I can't think of any situation where a user wants to see a pop-up window," says Amrit Williams, director of the Gartner Inc.'s information security practice. "They break the contract between the advertiser and user because they don't let you choose whether you wish to view the ad, so in many cases they make users angry."

I just wonder if this might have some backlash effect on McAfee, similar to how the rootkit effected SONY. Time will tell