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If they really cared about privacy, they would just stop spying on billions of people.”Ĭhoosing a browser is a highly subjective matter. They care about protecting their surveillance business model. Third, it should really do something about the exposure of these download portals in its search engine as this is where the majority of traffic comes from.“You don’t become a multi-billion-dollar company without grabbing as much data as you can then monetize,” Cyjax CISO Ian Thornton-Trump told me last month, just after (genuinely) privacy-first DuckDuckGo warned that “Google doesn’t care about protecting user privacy. It paints a negative image on the developer, Mozilla for instance, if Firefox is flagged as a file that can harm your computer. Second, it should make it clearer that the program itself is not the culprit here but the download portal. I think that this can be easily done by analyzing file names of said wrappers on sites that use them. First, it should not display the warning for files that are offered directly unless they include adware. Unless I missed that Softpedia started to use ad-wrappers as well, it is unclear why warnings are displayed on the site.

That's bad for Softpedia, Mozilla and maybe also the user who may decide not to download the program even though it would not do any harm.

If you download Firefox from Softpedia you get a message that the file could harm your computer even though the download and installer are clean.

The system right now does not seem to make a distinction between any of that. So which sites are affected by the message? Sites that are known to wrap downloads in advertisement packages such as Sourceforge,, Filehippo and Softonic are but it may come as a surprise that other download sites such as Softpedia which don't wrap downloads in adware installers are also affected by this.įirst of all, the message should only be displayed if software is offered in wrappers or if software itself contains adware offers.

This too could be resolved by improving the algorithm and information displayed on the screen to make it clear that the download site is the offender and not necessarily the company that developed the program. One side-effect of displaying the warning for all program downloads, even direct ones that don't contain wrappers, is that people may associate "bad" with the company developing the software and not with the download portal.