torquill: Art-deco cougar face (geekchick)
Torquill ([personal profile] torquill) wrote2005-02-24 05:47 pm
Entry tags:

Paging Tom Lehrer

Irony is truly alive and well.

The Chief Privacy Officer of the company formerly known as Gator (remember them?) has just been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security, as part of the "Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee". D. Reed Freeman will be one of 20 members on the panel. (The Salon article requires registration, but I recommend you sit through the free day pass if you want to read the whole short article -- it's pretty painless.)

This is the same Gator, by the way, that became infamous while making the term "spyware" familiar to a lot of people. The adware they installed on unwitting systems, by attaching it to popular programs as a hitchhiker of sorts, added advertisements in all sorts of places as you surfed the net. It was difficult to detect, even harder to remove. Nice show of integrity for a former Chief Privacy Officer.

Of course, the Chief Privacy Officer of the Department of Homeland Security itself used to work for DoubleClick... why am I not surprised.

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