Proposal to fight deceptive software - making sense of EULAs
"Brian Erdelyi" <[email protected]> Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:11:04 -0400
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.security.virus |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I'm working on a personal project, http://www.clearware.org, and would appreciate feedback and suggestions from others on this list. My idea is similar in concept to nutrition facts on food, care labels on clothing and warnings on hazardous materials. A "software use" label, if you will, that summarizes terms and conditions of an end-user license agreement (EULA) that impacts control over the users experience, system security and privacy. My initial research shows that almost 80% of people never or rarely read EULAs. This isn't suprising as I believe EULAs are too long, ambiguous and inconspicuous for the average user to understand anyways. Regardless, I believe that users need to be informed about the software they install and simple labels to depict characteristics of a EULA will help. How can a vendor obtain meaningful and informed consent to a EULA if the user doesn't read or understand it? I hope this will help provide more awareness of EULAs and allow consumers to truly understand the nature of software before purchasing and installing it. The lack of informed consent is what constitutes malware or badware. While researching various EULAs and following work done by Creative Commons, these characteristics can be grouped as permissions, requirements, restrictions and functions. For each characteristic I have also created a symbol at http://www.clearware.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=30 I believe this will aloow regular users to better protect themselves against software that may impact their user experience, system security and privacy without their consent. Any thoughts? Brian Erdelyi ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALERT: "How a Hacker Launches a SQL Injection Attack!" - White Paper It's as simple as placing additional SQL commands into a Web Form input box giving hackers complete access to all your backend systems! https://download.spidynamics.com/1/ad/sql.asp?Campaign_ID=70160000000CZWl ----------------------------------------------------------------------------