TRUSTe, the leading privacy certification and seal program, late on Friday announced the launch of its Trusted Download Program.

Earlier today, Zango hosted a conference call to discuss this morning’s announced FTC Settlement.

In announcing a settlement agreement with Zango, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today established standards for the online downloadable software industry and, most importantly, provided online consumers with a new and higher level of protection. Zango has met or exceeded the key notice and consent standards detailed in the FTC consent order since at least January 1, 2006.

Do you like cookies? Chocolate chip? Oatmeal raisin? How about “magic cookies?” Because we work with thousands of online advertisers, the question about the behavior of “cookies” often comes up. Far from the easy responses of they are best warm and with milk, computer “cookies” have different behaviors and purposes, and most of all, a massive lack of clarity in the minds of most online advertisers. We here at Zango wanted to take a few minutes to both describe and link to some cookie information, and explain some of the work done to better understand how “cookies” interact with our desktop advertising products.

In the category of “you can’t EVER please some people,” this week’s winner is: Sunbelt. A Sunbelt blog post this week highlights the lengths some folks will go to keep themselves detached from consumer reality...

People, both amateur and professional, make videos for all sorts of reasons – more than 3,500 years of new video footage is created every single year, according to Trends magazine. The two primary ones, though, are fame and/or fortune. Lonelygirl15 proved both points true, not to mention ways to attain these goals. Zango’s President and Co-founder Daniel Todd explains.

Following last week’s dismissal, with prejudice, of a putative class action lawsuit against Zango, Eric Benderoff, technology reporter of The Chicago Tribune, asks, “Are some companies unfairly painted as violating our privacy and polluting our computers?”

Nearly a year ago, and to much fanfare in the blogosphere, a putative class action lawsuit was filed against Zango, known at the time as 180solutions, Inc. Yesterday, the case – Simios v. 180solutions, Inc. – was dismissed, with prejudice.

Consumer Reports’ recent report (“Cyber Insecurity,” September 2006) perpetuates the all-too-common mistake of lumping legitimate “adware” into the same nefarious bucket polluted by “spyware.” Zango CEO Keith Smith responded in writing to the magazine’s editors, a complete copy of which is within this posting.