A WORD TO THE WISE

This applies to you if you are on FaceBook, and play any of their games and/or ever decide to click an ad for an online game.

WARNING:

Below is the verbatim text as I sent it to Face Book as a complaint:

"There are some 3rd-Party applications and games running on FaceBook, and then there are those which come up as ads. I believe this complaint falls into that category, and this is an ad/company that FaceBook should block/disallow in order to retain its credibility as a safe venue.

"Specifically, the outfit in question is “GAMEVANCE.” They run the game “Duck Hunt” among their other ‘free online games’ offerings. In order to play, they require a person to sign up for an ‘account.’ This is free, but they ask for you to supply your e-mail address.

"Yesterday, I did sign up, and attempted to play a few games. The site is not user-friendly at all, because after you have finished a game, (screen reads, “game over”), you cannot open another one; it tells you that you already have a game open, and must close it first. Unfortunately, there is no way to do this. No ‘close’ button, and by the time this message is displayed, the game you were playing is no longer visible, anyway. The only way to effectively ‘close’ the game is to log out and start again. A nuisance, at best.

"Yet, that is not the worst part. The major problem with this outfit is that they ARE guilty of SPYWARE and ADWARE!!

"I had not had my “account” for even 2 hours, when I noticed, when checking one of my blogs, that all of a sudden, one of the words well down in an article was underlined as a hyperlink, and a mouse-over brought up a “GAMEVANCE” search engine dialog box.

"Now, HOW did they get INTO my blog, and mess with it to do this??? Because they are SPIES!!! How do I know this? Simple! In signing up for anything that I’m not quite sure I trust, I use a DIFFERENT e-mail address than I do for anything else. No one knows about what this e-mail addy is; I don’t tell anyone. It IS a DIFFERENT e-mail than the one I use for both my blogs and my FaceBook account!

"ERGO---this PROVES that “GAMEVANCE” snooped into my computer, and found all my other items, and without permission, inserted their invasive link into my blog!!! This is INTOLERABLE, UNACCEPTABLE, AND UNETHICAL IN THE EXTREME!

"FaceBook should take whatever steps are necessary to IMMEDIATELY block/cancel/remove “GAMEVANCE” and any and all of its apps from any connection with FaceBook. This is vital in order for FaceBook to maintain its credibility as a safe venue.

"This information WILL BE POSTED everywhere else on the web I can think of…including copies to the ‘big 3’ broadcast corporations. “GAMEVANCE” is a dangerous player, and needs to be taken down posthaste!