Surfwatch Advertising Porn

sparky writes, "I got some snail spam from Surfwatch today. Normally this kind of junk is round filed immediately, but this was too good to be destroyed without scanning it in first. They are listing porn sites on the *outside* of their envelopes. I love irony. It's so ironic. " If Surfwatch doesn't want kids to find naughty sites, they could start by not listing them on their mailings.

Wow! Amazing advertising potential!

[dlc]

Imagine how much they could charge for listing your company's name on the outside of their envelope, associated with the word porn. You know that every 14-year-old boy who saw this in the mailbox wrote down every URL, and probably visited them all. That's thousands, possibly more, of banner ads that will get served just to people looking for porn. Come to think of it, all those concerned parents are also going to look at all the sites listed, for similar reasons ("Gotta find out which site to block"). If I owned a company, and needed some sneaky ad money, I would jump at this chance.

Although it's not really the same thing, this reminds me of how search engines will prominently feature ads for certain companies based on search terms (Ford ads when you search for "cars", etc).

darren

Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

morality and business are not good bed fellows

[haus]

You have to remember that these companies are not "against" porn, because without something objectionable then they do not have a business. They do more to hype the existence of "dangerous" information than any other organization because spreading the hysteria that by merely looking up information on pokeman you will be forced to see 7000 porn pictures and the instructions on how to build a thermo-nuclear device, hence you NEED our software.

Follow the money trail, and you will see that yes these companies want to help. Help themselves to your money.

all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut