Anonymous writes "Much to my irritation, and surely to that of many other paying subscribers of the McAfee "Virus Scan Online" antivirus product, McAfee has now decided to use this ActiveX application as a means of sending unsolicited "pop up" ads to VSO users. Apparently, Mcafee has decided that subscribers are a "captive" audience, and since the antivirus program is "trusted" by a user's firewall and "ad blocker" software... what better way to send them unwanted ads that can't be stopped for any number of McAfee and third-party products (or possibly install some nefarious trojan-like feature... like mining a users PC for info that they would sell?).
 
Below is the response I received from McAfee when I complained about the new "feature"...

"We appreciate your feedback and will certainly pass your comments to the appropriate people within our company.

While we can understand your feelings regarding the advertising displayed on our web site, we have made the decision to include advertising as a means of enabling us to offer our web based applications and services at a lower cost than we would otherwise be able to do.

If enough customers share your feelings, our company may decide to override the previous decision regarding the display of advertising, or limit such advertising to areas of the site other than those on which our products are used or purchased. That said, your opinions do matter to us, and we are grateful that you took the time to tell us how you feel."

McAfee just lost me as a customer. I have uninstalled "Virus Spam Online", and now run another antivirus product that is ad-free... one that is incidentally also free of charge for personal use!

Dan"