McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

Last week the top executives of Freeze.com were announced winners of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2006 award in the Minnesota and Dakotas region. Freeze.com's co-founders were recognized as "outstanding leaders" in the E-Business industry, and they're now eligible to be considered for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2006 national program. Ernst & Young says it gives these awards to celebrate "visionaries who are creating and building world-class businesses." We were surprised to learn that freeze.com had been selected as a winner. We have concerns about their business practices. We wouldn't be inclined to give Freeze any awards.

Freeze.com is an online provider of free screensavers, desktop wallpapers, and other download content. Freeze.com presumably makes money by promoting offers from affiliate advertisers and from bundling third party software with the site’s downloads. McAfee SiteAdvisor rates freeze.com red, because when we entered a unique e-mail address on the site, we received an overwhelming 94 spammy e-mails per week.

Freeze.com's homepage

Entering our e-mail address on freeze.com resulted in 94 spammy e-mails per week.

When we downloaded Freeze's Living Marine Aquarium 2 screensaver, we were required to register our e-mail address in order to become a Freeze member. Once we had registered, we were prompted to fill out a list of questions styled as a survey. But the "survey" is really a gateway to Freeze's advertising offers. Each survey question is strategically written to increase the chance that users will answer "Yes"; for example: "Do you think you should be paid more?" and "Do you enjoy listening to music?" Each time we clicked "Yes", we received a solicitation from one of Freeze's advertisers. And, as Freeze's privacy policy explains, information shared on Freeze's Web site, including e-mail addresses, "may be shared with affiliates and trusted business partners." A few hundred emails later, we think most users will consider this a remarkably bad deal.

Freeze requires users to fill out an offer survey before downloading from the site.

In addition, once we got through the multiple offer screens, Freeze's download came bundled with the Yahoo! Toolbar, WhenU SaveNow, The Weather Channel Desktop, and New dot Net with Quick Browser search assistant. The installation process also prompted us to change our browser's start page to freeze.com.

Freeze's screensaver may have been free to the user in the monetary sense: it's true that we didn't pay Freeze any money to get the screensaver. But Freeze users end up paying Freeze a steep price by allowing their e-mail address to be shared, accepting the installation of extra software, and letting third parties track their behavior. Apparently "free" does not mean that there are no strings attached: In addition to the "free" screensaver, users end up with third party software, much of which is often considered to be adware and spyware, a new homepage, and an inbox full of spam. Meanwhile, screensavers cost little to distribute, while advertising yields real revenues – so we sense that Freeze makes a tidy profit from this transaction.

SiteAdvisor reviewers have supported the site's red rating by expressing their frustration about their experiences with freeze.com on the user comment section of Freeze's SiteAdvisor site report page. In the past five months, 13 SiteAdvisor reviewer comments flagged the site for spam and spyware, including:

"One of the worst offenders for spyware distribution"

"Inbox filled to the brim with unwanted emails. Completely annoying."

"Stay away at all costs!"

We are alarmed and disappointed to see Ernst & Young – a global auditing powerhouse –praise these business practices. There is certainly a lot of money to be made through online affiliate advertising, and Freeze has seized this opportunity. But the world need not endorse Freeze's approach, where Freeze's profits come at consumers' expense.

We are not accusing Ernst & Young of supporting the proliferation of spam and spyware. But we believe this award is a symptom of a larger problem: that despite such expository articles by The LA Times' Joe Menn and the Washington Post's Robert MacMillan, the business community remains largely unaware that spam and spyware are created and funded by seemingly legitimate companies.

Last year Ernst & Young selected an executive of Webroot (an anti-spyware software provider) as one of Ernst & Young's 2005 Entrepreneurs of the Year. To Ernst & Young, Webroot and Freeze may both be entrepreneurs. But we think it's important to distinguish between the success of Freeze, a company that provides products and services of questionable value to consumers, and the success of Webroot, a company that provides products that help consumers.