New category "Deceptive Business Practices"
There are companies that use deceptive business practices either on their web site or in mobile applications that they sell or promote, e.g. flycell.com uses a 'continue' button that signs you up for a $9.99 monthly fee by using an SMS shortcode. It would be useful to be able to categorize and block such sites so that fewer people are caught by such 'deceptive business practices'.
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New categories can be suggested at the bottom of http://community.opendns.com/domaintagging/categories .
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File sharing is a different category. This is is intended to cover web sites that attempt to trick unsuspecting users into signing up for monthly fees, or other unwanted charges. The charges may be mentioned in small text hidden in the site's T's and C's but the average user does not realize this because the site is deceptive and or misleading as to what they are signing up for.
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@geaf No, not really, the vast majority of businesses on the web are reasonable and have reasonable policies but then there are sites that employ what a majority of internet users would consider "deceptive business practices". The whole idea behind a collaborative filter like this is to enable to majority to outvote the minority. This minority thinks that it's reasonable to trick you out of money or to install some software that changes your browser search settings. As a majority we can help each other by having categories like this that can eliminate 90%+ of the deceptive sites and thus save us all a lot of time. If you've never had to deal with the accidental click a child made that is now billing $9.99 a month to your cellphone account, which takes an hour to fix and get the charges removed, or you've never had to reset your parents' browser search settings again after they've been hijacked for the 10th time, then you should count yourself lucky!
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@proteanthread: With a 'collaborative filter' it really doesn't matter if one user tries to categorize a site as 'deceptive' only if a reasonable number of users agree (in a majority) that a certain site has tricked them out of money by, say, advertising X and delivering Y, or by burying a hidden $9.99 monthly fee, or a 35% restocking fee in the small print at the end of a five page long 'terms and conditions' section, or lying that your computer has a virus in order to get you to pay for a 'virus removal tool'.
As a user of OpenDNS you are always free to not use this filter. It would however be really helpful for children and others who may be more gullible if their family administrator could block such sites at the DNS level.
I'm fairly certain that over time the guidelines for 'deceptive practices' could be evolved with user feedback to include all of the common cases that 95%+ of OpenDNS users would point to and say "that's deceptive".
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Are you actually saying that every single domain registrar in existence is guilty of deceptive trade practices? That sounds more like a statement of your own personal ideology than anything else.
If such a category is ever created you are always free to add the domains of those registrars yourself and tag them with the category, which will then be voted upon by the other users of OpenDNS. However, I seriously doubt that OpenDNS is going to pay its employees to search out the domains of every domain registrar worldwide and simply add them to such a category without users input.
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