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by wordupmaking 3310 days ago
This is not so much a matter of debate as of reading up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware

> Some malware is used to generate money by click fraud, making it appear that the computer user has clicked an advertising link on a site, generating a payment from the advertiser. It was estimated in 2012 that about 60 to 70% of all active malware used some kind of click fraud, and 22% of all ad-clicks were fraudulent

If you want to coin a new term feel free, but malware means what it means and refers to malicious, not "more malicious than", not "malicious against the user" etc.

1 comments

Does this encompass malware that sends unique device identifiers to 3rd parties? Google account names? Or are those extremely common practices not considered malicious at all? In my opinion those are much more malicious actions. The only way to compare malicious with malicious is indeed relative. If one arguably malicious action is prohibited but another is not, you have to question the motivations. "More malicious than" common practice therefore seems like a very good question to ask.
Yes, I absolutely agree that plenty of commonly practiced or even accepted things are malicious, too, at least with the way they're hand waved away ("to improve our service" and worse).