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180Solutions Drops Lawsuit Against Zone Labs |
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Wednesday, 01 February 2006 |
Back in November, 180Solutions filed a lawsuit against Zone Labs, a company best known for its firewall software. 180Solutions filed suit because Zone Labs listed their software as spyware. 180Solutions didnt like that. But today, the lawsuit was dropped with strong attached and no reason for dumping the suit.
The cause of the suit was tied to how Zone Labs firewall, ZoneAlarm, labeled some of the technology used by the Zango and 180Search Assistant programs. According to Zone Labs and their parent company Check Point Software Technologies, they were asked to change nothing. There were no negotiated settlement or anything.
"From the inception of the suit, we believed it had no merit," said John Slavitt, general counsel for Check Point Software Technologies, parent company of Zone Labs. "ZoneAlarm alerts are triggered by the behavior of a program, not its name. If the 180Solutions software exhibits suspicious behavior, we alert our customers accordingly. We did not make any concessions or reach a settlement after the suit was filed.
"For example, if a customer downloads the 180Solutions Zango program today, the following ZoneAlarm alert is shown to the user: "Zango is attempting to monitor user activities on your computer. If allowed it may try to track or log keystrokes (user input), mouse movements/clicks, Web sites visited, and other user behaviors.
"Our customers rely on ZoneAlarm to protect them while they innocently surf the Internet," said Laura Yecies, general manager of Zone Labs and vice president of Check Point. "Ultimately, all consumers must be able to choose what to allow on their PC and to understand the intent of the program. Zone Labs remains committed to innovating proactive protection to advance the safety of all consumers online."
If one were to speculate, one would probably say that 180Solutions has a whole lot of other problems right now, trying to fend off lawsuits of their own. California Superior Court filed suit against them back in December along with two other companies. And then last week, the Center for Democracy and Technology also requested the FTC levy charges of "illegal and deceptive" practices against the Internet marketing firm.
The future doesnt look to good for 180Solutions right now. |