CastleCops® - WhenU lives on the edge of danger

WhenU, a company that has been one of the hottest topics in the anti-spyware and spyware communities today, seems to like living on the edge, or at least teetering on the fence. One day they fall into the category of spyware and are being removed by spyware scanners, and the next day they are not. Even companies who label WhenU "spyware safe" are found to be removing them and keeping them at the same time. WhenU seems to be getting a lot of free advertising lately. Why spend money on advertising, when the spyware dictionaries can do it for them?

Suzi at Spyware Warrior shares with the readers some additional testing that Eric Howes conducts using Spyware Eliminator ((AluriaSoftware) and Ad-Aware (Lavasoft). Mike Healan approaches this story at yet another angle. Both are recommended reading, and Suzi's offers awesome snapshots.

Aluria is one such company that labeled WhenU "spyware safe" and yet continued to remove them in the AOL distributed version of SpywareEliminator. But in their public distribution, WhenU was untouched.

That has now changed as Eric has found. Aluria has put WhenU back into their list of baddies. But what is odd, is that Lavasoft is now no longer removing WhenU from their spyware/adware scans. And it seems no notice went out to its users. Could it be a fluke? Could something have been missed? I hope so, because in the past Lavasoft has shown mistakes do happen and with notification, can be resolved. Was this a "mistake"?

Lavasoft has been asked this question a reply is still forthcoming.

A very good discussion about this is taking place at DSL Reports.

In a PC Pitstop survey, 87% of users with WhenU installed on their systems had no knowledge of that.

In our survey, 86% of users (total 1644 responded) do not trust Aluria's SpywareEliminator. The survey was being held under the notion that Aluria still kept WhenU out of their general consumer dictionary. But it appears that now even though Aluria says WhenU is "spyware safe", all their dictionaries now claim otherwise per Eric's testing.

But is this really surprising? Aluria stood by COAST for a long time and now recently dumped it -- as its co-founder. COAST seems like its done and overcooked. In a time of uncertainty where consistency is required and a strong public message delivered, companies are showing the world they aren't quite sure where to fit. It seems that company policies and visions are bending like the willow tree. The wind takes them on its whim. Are we all living on the edge of danger?


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