A coalition including Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute with the support of several prominent tech companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems and Consumer Reports WebWatch has banded together to fight “badware”, the groups generic term that includes spyware, adware and any other software which “fundamentally disregards a user’s choice over how his or her computer will be used”.
A: StopBadware.org is a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers make better choices about what they download onto their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.