NebuAd

Opt out vs. opt in

Members of US Congress, Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, and Joe Barton, a ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, have argued that such services must be opt-in only to comply with the provisions laid down by Section 631 of the US Communications Act, and they wrote to Charter to request them to suspend the test: "We respectfully request that you do not move forward on Charter Communications' proposed venture with NebuAd until we have an opportunity to discuss with you issues raised by this proposed venture."

A writer for Wired News questioned whether Charter users could really opt out of being monitored or if they were able to opt out only of receiving targeted ads. The same writer has asked if it would breach anti-wiretapping laws.

An engineer who examined the system confirmed there was no way to opt out of NebuAd's monitoring. All inbound and outbound information was intercepted and sent to NebuAd's offsite server to be processed. Even if a user had opted out of the service, it did not prevent the ISP from sending the data to NebuAd.

Use of packet forgery and browser exploits

A report by Robert M. Topolski, chief technology consultant of the Free Press and Public Knowledge, showed NebuAd's devices created cookies on end-users machines by injecting a specious packet into the end of the data stream returned in response to some web page requests submitted to search engines, including Google and Yahoo. The content of this suspicious packet, which would be added to the end of the web page when it is rendered by the end-user's browser, contained HTML script tags which cause the browser to run Javascript code.

Superimposing or adding advertising to webpages

Critics were concerned that NebuAd superimposed its own advertising over the ads of other advertisers, or placing additional advertising to a page. These concerns originated o the NebuAd's "Fair Eagle" operation, patent application data which mentioned such inventions, and a loose relationship to Claria Corporation whose products and history suggest such tactics, as well as by the following:

In 2007 it was reported that Redmoon, a Texas-based ISP was using a NebuAd technology to inject Redmoon's own advertising into pages visited by its users. The "Fair Eagle" advertisement hardware, provided by NebuAd, inserted additional advertising alongside the content of web pages. The ads featured a window with the "Fair Eagle" title bar. The injected ads stopped appearing toward the end of June, 2007.

Relationship with Claria Corporation

Some senior staff members of NebuAd had worked previously at a (now defunct) ad company, named Claria Corporation (formerly, the Gator Corporation), which was well known for ad software known as Gator. Both Claria and NebuAd were located in Redwood City, California. The June 2006 creation of nebuad.com coincides with timing of Claria's decision to shut down the Gator service. NebuAd repeatedly denied any corporate connection to Claria, describing its hiring of Claria employees as a result of that company shedding employees in a tight market for experienced advertising sales staff in the Valley.

Class-action lawsuit

A proposed settlement for a class-action lawsuit against NebuAd was underway in October 2011. All subscribers to the ISPs listed above between January 1, 2007, and July 1, 2008, were to be considered mandatory class members and so did not have to opt in and could not choose to opt out. Under the terms of the proposed settlement, NebuAd would create a settlement fund of approximately $2,410,000, to be used for administration of the settlement, covering legal fees, an incentive award of $5,000 to the individual who brought the complaint, providing up to $1000 for other named representatives, with most of the money going to support non-profits providing consumer education and privacy research.