Hello Spybot team,
Thank you for your response.
Roar.com is a commercial advertising network. While we screen our advertisers when they apply to be part of our network, we cannot take responsibility for actions that are out of our control. We can however remove them from our network should we have sufficient proof that they have breached our terms and conditions. We are investigating the winantivirus software concerns that you have raised, but so far have only found speculation rather than proof that this package contains spyware. As I am sure you can appreciate, any breach of a contractual obligation must be proven, rather than speculated against on a forum. While we will continue to investigate, any information you can provide to help us bring light to this case would be appreciated.
When you say “complain”, could you please explain exactly what you mean? As an advertising network, customers can bid on keyterms to have results displayed. For example, PCTools.com advertises on the keyterm “Spybot” at both Lycos (http://search.lycos.com/?src=sf&loc=sem&query=spybot) and Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=spybot). It should also be noted that our 24 hour customer care department is available to review any complaints from any visitor to our sites.
Quote:
hotsearch.com#|roar.com
Is blocked in IESPYADS:
(
http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/resource.htm)
These block lists are based in part on info from:
discussions in the SpywareInfo Forums, Spyware Warrior, CastleCops,
and other forums that specialize in crapware removal
After looking in those forums, the only references to roar.com I could find were to sites that were removed from the roar.com network long ago. It should also be noted that there have been no discussions about roar.com in Castlecops or the Spybot forums, other than this thread.
In response to MisterW’s questions:
Quote:
"Roar.com does not normally link IP addresses to any personal information, which means that a Visitor's session will be logged, but the Visitor otherwise remains anonymous."
What means normally? Are the Ip addresses stored or not?
There are two different types of people that visit our sites, Surfers (anonymous visitors) and Advertisers that wish to promote their site through Roar.com. For surfers, IP addresses are stored, but without any personally identifiable information. This is for fraud detection purposes. To protect our advertisers, we proactively monitor the streams of traffic to search terms to ensure the traffic is of a high standard. We monitor such things as duplicate requests to advertisers. A way to identify duplicate clicks for example would be to use the request and the IP address of its origin. This protects our advertisers and ensures they are not paying for false clicks or poor traffic. This is common in the pay-per-click industry. For advertisers, we store personally identifiable information because they have a financial relationship with us. We may need to link IP addresses and personal information to ensure the security of the account has been maintained, for example, logging in from two geographically disperse places at the same time.
Quote:
"Roar.com can and will use IP addresses to identify a Visitor when it is necessary to enforce compliance with our terms of service or to protect the integrity of our services and websites, as well as to protect our interests and those of our Customers."
Hm, how is it possible to identify visitors when IP adresses normally not get stored or linked to personal informations?
As mentioned previously, we can only identify advertisers, not surfers. We do this for reasons explained above.
Quote:
"there may be times when Roar.com may be required to disclose personal information of a Customer or Visitor without their consent. This may occur where we have reason to believe that disclosing the information is:
necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against the Customer, Visitor or another person who may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) the rights or property of Roar.com or its subsidiaries, other Customers or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities; or required by law."
In what case it could be necessary to contact customers or visitors without their consent????? And how you will do it without storing personal information?
If a client or host performed a DoS attack, or some other form of malicious activity, and the investigation was able to identify the culprit based on personal information that they had submitted previously (ie, when they signed up for an advertiser account), then there may be a requirement to report their personal information to the relevant authorities for prosecution.
It should be noted that the “personal information” that is referred to in the terms and conditions is that of our customers who have signed up to advertise with roar.com.
I appreciate your response, however we are, and have done all that you have asked in the past. We have been pro-active in amending our terms and conditions based on your recommendations, and our policies are very similar to others in the industry. We will continue to work with you regarding the winantivirus.com case. We are a search engine with many of the terms and conditions no different to other major search engines in the industry. My concern is that every time we have done what you ask, we have simply been provided with another reason why we cannot be removed from your lists. Our original placement in your lists was based on terms and conditions that were taken out of context. This was explained in a private message to your reviews department. We then took your suggestions and revised our privacy policy taking your recommendations into consideration.
We will continue to work with you on being removed from your lists, however I would like to hear some sort of assurance that what we are doing is being recognized as a positive step toward the removal from your block lists.
Thank you
Bill