John Thompson, Symantec CEO, thinks their company is not in the security business and instead in the protection business. I couldn’t disagree more based on their Antispam application that intentionally alters webpages without publisher’s permission. Their program might be ‘protecting’ their users from seeing advertisements, but it’s not protecting publisher’s right to show them. Maybe what he really means is we’ll only protect people who use their products? I won’t use Symantec products for this very reason. None of them. Not withstanding this, when I have tried using them in the past (for testing/review) I haven’t cared for them.

“We’ve not been an antivirus company since 2000,” said Thompson. Even the word “security,” he said, no longer accurately describes what his company does: “We are in the protection business. Not like Tony Soprano, but we see a need to move the protection closer to the data.”

Lest we forget back in January when Symantec acknowledged a rootkit-type infestation in SystemWorks. Sure sounds Soprano-ish to me.

Ad filitering, man, this is a touchy subject. Moreso from a publisher perspective than a reader.

Generally speaking, I’m not against people using ad blockers. Heck, I use popup blockers, but don’t do any ad filtering. If a site is jammed with ads, I’ll see every one of them as long as they don’t popup or popunder (sorry, those can sometimes crash our system, so that is a real protection issue). I even see those full page inbetween ads (CNET has started using them lately, I see, argh).

It’s important to keep in mind that for sites which depend on ad revenue model to continue to offset the costs of financing them that if enough people use these ad stripping programs then the publisher will be faced with finding other methods to offset these costs. Some might be more intrusive than they would like. The saving grace for publishers today remains that most people still don’t use these programs. I have my doubts, however, that this will last long term.

Understandably, I don’t want to contribute to or assist these ad filtering endeavors so you will not see me advertising Symantec products or services at Hmm as long as they offer these type services. That’s not to say we won’t review their products or services, but banners and ads won’t be shown here — unless Google Adsense shows them and we haven’t blocked them. Wouldn’t it be ironic if on this blog post Google decides to show their ads? I will go in and block them in the Adsense menu if that happens. If readers see any other Symantec banner or text ads here, please use the comments below to tell me about it. Would like to be consistent on this one but the amount of control publishers have on contextual ads shown by Google is limited (I think it’s 200 URLs, but I might be wrong).

Some readers might note I’ve pointed to Greasemonkey here a few times which is often used to filter ads and that might seem hypocritical. Greasemonkey is also used for other purposes, some of which are pretty creative and useful. Greasemonkey can be used to add features to a website until the main site adds them. If Greasemonkey was only or primarily an ad filtering program I wouldn’t support them. I’m sure neither Symantec or Greasemonkey gives a damn whether or not a single publisher supports them, but at least readers know where we stand.

I wish more publishers would stop taking Symantec’s money and consider doing the same. Promoting products which undermine our business model is counter-productive, isn’t it? As a reader I have no problem with ads that are tastefully done and not in my face or disrupting the content. We try to keep things that way here but overuse of programs that filter ads and less revenue could change this model in the future.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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