Want to know how McAfee "SiteAdvisor" makes money on you? See if you are one of
the targets! by Alexander Rodichev
The company "Smart PC Solutions", a developer of easy to use solutions for the
optimization of your PC, has become the victim of a negative rating on Mcafee's
"SiteAdvisor" just like many other sites, most having no idea that they have
received a negative review or why. This causes direct financial losses for many
companies but in actuality it redistributes money in favor of McAfee, which
sells its anti-virus solutions to terrified users who do not delve very deeply
into the details and believe the unjustified ratings.
This is an obvious case of unfair competition via their security software sales
promotion by destroying other companies' goodwill.
McAfee's "SiteAdvisor" assigns a color to each site to indicate safe, caution,
or warning ratings sometimes based only on average users' comments (besides
other things). A big red cross (warning) definitely states the presence of a
virus and/or spyware activity on the rated site. Their motto reads as follows:
"Protection from Adware, Spam and Viruses". Here comes the surprise: the
company "Smart PC Solutions" has nothing to do with spreading viruses yet it
has received a rating of a Big Red Cross - beware of the virus threat! Most of
the software provided on "Smart PC Solutions" is freeware utilities and
sometimes users fail to achieve the desired results as two customers' comments
have testified. The majority of the user feedback on "Smart PC Solutions" has
been positive and appreciative. Do you know where McAfee placed the comments on
the performance of the "Free Data Recovery" utilities? They put them in the
"Bad Shopping Experience" section. Amazing! Do you see any logic here? "Smart
PC Solutions" supplies Free Data Recovery software (worth over $50.00) for FREE
(as well as many other useful things)! The first question to McAfee is: "What
does shopping have to do with the Free Data Recovery products?" Let's go
further and raise the second question to McAfee: "What does a shopping
experience have to do with the virus warning rating?" Where did they find
products containing viruses or spyware on the
http://www.smartpctools.com
site? McAfee misleads or intentionally deceives people, by intimidating them
with erroneous negative ratings that could present a case for litigation. Now a
question to the readers: "Do you still trust this system of evaluation?" There
is an interesting fact that the Siteadvisor.com site itself has a significant
number of negative evaluations by users but the site is not marked with even a
"Caution"! Draw your own conclusions!
As the owner of "Smart PC Solutions", I wrote a letter to McAfee's legal
department requesting a removal of the negative rating, but was astonished by a
reply from an official representative of McAfee stating that they put us in the
same basket with spyware producers because some public association has rated
our FREE anti-spyware solution as "not strong enough" and that it contains
advertising of our other products. Information about that was found in one user
comment. So what? We have created our own anti-spyware solution for our
customers to remove widespread unwanted components. We do not pretend to be the
leader in this field. This was not our aim. Here is the third question to
McAfee: Since when has market evaluation been entrusted to random researchers
and public associations in such an important matter as issuing guilty or
not-guilty verdicts! There is not a word about this on McAfee's site! Recently,
several "independent evaluators" have emerged mooching on the anti-spyware
market, and it is a well-known fact that they often are consultants for
anti-spyware companies so their opinions could potentially be biased towards
one developer or another.
I wonder if many of your users understand that by trusting McAfee, they trust
various paranoid evaluators, whose true interests are dubious. When making a
deal with McAfee you, as their customers, did not intend to deal with a club of
amateurs and individual exterminators. When buying a car, you do not enter into
a contract with a club of energy-saving engine fans or a club of some
brand-name fans, and you do not allow them to dictate conditions!
There are millions of sites on the Internet now, thousands are emerging and
disappearing every day. As an IT expert and company owner, I am curious as to
how SiteAdvisor is able to rate them and update their database in real time
since it is an enormous amount of information. They found a simple solution -
they rely on users' comments posted on SiteAdvisor. Users already observe a
slow-down in their PC's operation when the system is installed! As a matter of
fact, McAfee bought SiteAdvisor as early as April 2006, and my guess is that
the workload will keep increasing. The problem is partially solved by users,
who produce ratings and who McAfee relies on. This is too simple and unreliable
a solution for such a responsible matter! The fact is that the company labels
one site or another as potentially hazardous for it's own reasons, not on the
recommendation of users-evaluators. This is the ultimate truth of the project,
which in fact smells like slender. As far as site development is concerned, I
have the following perspective: We have an obvious case of redistribution in
the anti-spyware solutions market. Where the market disposition does not exist,
it is being created. There has been a significant rise in the number of
passionate users' rights activists with a maniac attitude. Their real
motivation is very questionable. The problem is largely forged to pump up
anti-spyware hysteria, to frighten users and then sell them a "solution" to the
problem. This is unfair moneymaking. McAfee earns as much as you lose from
users avoiding your site being scared away by fake ratings designed simply to
sell them a security solution. If you are not a site owner, you will buy their
security solution when you see the fake warning ratings. In both cases regular
customers bring their money to the anti-virus company.
Microsoft, possessing much more powerful Subscriptions, does not attempt to
evaluate all sites. It simply created an inexpensive and effective solution,
Windows Live OneCare, as the market leader ought to. In view of unprecedented
success of this solution, McAfee was left with nothing to do but to take up
emergency measures to secure its market share. This is a clumsy attempt to
retain the vanishing market. With such an approach they will first lose the
credibility of software developers like "Smart PC Solutions" and then the
users, who will see their fake ratings and notice how benign sites get negative
reviews unfairly.
One can get a negative rating on SiteAdvisor just for a link to a site that is
considered hazardous by them. It would be good if there was a uniform policy
for everyone, but unfortunately this is not the case, and the policy is indeed
selective. SiteAdvisor does not analyze the context of a given linked site. It
is simply impossible to do for the entire Web. The selective policy of Site
Advisor is clearly represented by the positive ranking given to a huge social
network called MySpace. This social network has over a million user accounts,
and there have been cases when spyware developers spread infected video files
on the pages of MySpace users. Right in the comments of this site, there is a
link to a report by the famous anti-virus company, Sunbelt, about finding
infected video files in the MySpace system. Here is a paradox: SiteAdvisor does
not take the information of a reputed company into a consideration. In the case
of "Smart PC Solutions", the opinion of a "random observer" is taken into a
consideration! A lot of negative responses about the system are given in the
comments on the site. The same selective policy is observed with the well-known
American software registration service Plimus.com, defamed by SiteAdvisor and
marked as hazardous as a result of links to sites not related to the company.
There is no single negative user's comment! All comments read that Plimus is
safe for online purchasing!
In my opinion, SiteAdvisor pursues a selective policy because it fears
potential legal actions by big and reputed companies knowing the full truth
about its system of rating. I think lawsuits will follow soon.
It is clear that McAfee has just recently acquired SiteAdvisor, and that there
is a need to scare the public, but they have done it at the expense of many
small site owners. I think there will be an upsurge of anger from business
owners who suffer losses from unfair ratings.
Make an experiment of your own - test your favorite information sites, movie and
music stars' sites and share this article with your friends. Let us know if you
do or do not agree with the SiteAdvisor ratings. Share your opinions and
stories with us. Speak out now, and your comments and stories will be published
on the
http://www.smartpctools.com/truth
web page.
Users' new articles and voting results will be regularly published here. Visit
our site if you want to see the real picture and express your own opinion!
About the Author
Alexander Rodichev is a founder of Smart PC Solutions company located in
Alexandria, VA. The company develops easy to use solutions for daily care to
keep users PC in a good shape.
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