Me.dium Responds to StopBadware Recommendations

Another badware alert release was averted this week, as Me.dium, “a social browsing software company,” worked quickly to improve the disclosure provided to users of their browser plug-in after StopBadware.org sent them a draft of the alert we intended to release. (Sending a draft of the alert to the software producer a couple business days ahead of time is our standard policy.)

The primary concern that we raised was that the plug-in is advertised as a way to share websites and messages with friends, but it was not clear that the plug-in also shared your browsing history with Me.dium. To address our recommendation to make this clear and conspicuous to the user, they added the following text to the installation pop-up:

This plug-in shares your browsing history with Me.dium. Get the facts here!

This text links to their privacy policy, which they also updated to use plain, user-understandable language. The policy includes this paragraph “above the fold” (i.e., on the first screen of text without scrolling):

The first and MOST IMPORTANT thing to know about Me.dium is that when you use Me.dium, you are sharing your web activity with us. If we phrase that in a way that most other people have had to in the past, it translates as, “We monitor your web browsing behavior.” There, that is as blunt and straightforward as we can make it. If you are uncomfortable AT ALL with sharing this type of information with Me.dium, then please don’t install Me.dium. And, if you’ve already installed and want out, please click here for clear uninstall instructions. If you still have trouble, please email us at Support and we’ll do whatever we can to help you uninstall Me.dium.

Me.dium also reportedly asked its distribution partners to add the “This plug-in shares…” text to their descriptions of the plug-in.

David, our contact at Me.dium, was not only professional and pleasant to work with, but he immediately got it, with “it” being the need for clear, conspicuous disclosure to users about a software behavior that, while not inherently bad, could be unwanted and unexpected. The changes that Me.dium made reflect this understanding.

We hope to continue seeing our alerts averted or quickly deactivated by companies that are responsive to the needs of users. Even better, of course, will be to see less need for the alerts to be drafted in the first place.

Disclosure: Me.dium sponsored the Cookie Crumbles Contest, an event sponsored by StopBadware.org and the Berkman Center last year.