“Oh dear” pretty much sums up what I want to say about this. Oh dear, oh dear. This week, Mozilla launched a new viral marketing campaign, Fight Against Boredom - and promptly had to reel it back in again as the Internet erupted in outrage. So, in case you blinked and missed it, I’ll recap.

The Firefox Users Fight Against Boredom website contained a YouTube video, fake talk show footage, a Facebook link, blogs, MP3s of the Fight Boredom song, and links to download Firefox. All good, fairly standard viral marketing fare, except that on the blog were some statistics that … well, were a bit offensive, or hurtful, or just not very funny. Here are some of the stats that were included:

Compared to Internet Explorer users, Firefox users are -

* 15% more likely to have watched cartoons
* 21% less likely to have gone fishing
* 14% less likely to have sleeping disorders
* 67% more likely to go mountain biking
* 40% less likely to be widowed
* 53% more likely to go hiking
* 60% more likely to drink microbrew beer
* 51% less likely to be an accountant
* 26% more likely to have gone to a live concert
* 6% more likely to practice yoga
* 113% more likely to be a student
* 17% more likely to be self-employed
* 21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business
* 45% more likely to have gone on vacation in San Francisco within the last 2 years
* 33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol
* 23% less likely to have cancer
* 20% less likely to live with others suffering from cancer
* 25% less likely to have breast cancer
* 38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.
* 24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.
* 66% more likely to have viewed or listened to audio or video about politics or public affairs news within the last 30 days.

See the problem? Yeah. Not the most sensitive campaign, or even the most logical. The site was pulled, and Mozilla’s VP of Marketing, Paul Kim, apologised on his blog for the whole debacle, saying:

“The site was not meant to be publicly available and contained several stats, taken from a recent Nielsen study, that were offensive and in poor taste, as pointed out both by readers of TechCrunch and many people here at Mozilla. I want to sincerely apologize for this oversight. We hadn