Spyware
Advertising Supported Software

How would you like for someone to know everywhere you have been on the Internet?  They probably know even better than you where you have been.  And you are providing much of the computing power for them to gather this information!

Most of us are interested in obtaining free software that does something that seems neat, or we are interested in.  Often, you find a program on the Web that appears to be interesting, so you download it.  You might not even have a need for it, but hey, it is free!  Once installed on your system you may or may not use it,  but you don't worry about it.  What you may not know is that the innocent little program you downloaded is sending information about where you go on the Internet back to a URL.  This is presented, if it is indeed presented, as a way for the publisher to collect advertising information to support the product.

While most of us are concerned about viruses, most of us aren't aware of the existence of Spyware.  And while the purpose of the information has to do with advertising, and the user is to remain anonymous, the conspiracy theorist among us are suggesting there are more sinister uses for the data.  There are also suspicions that some programs send back much more information than just anonymous information about where you have been on the Internet.  The potential exist for these programs to send back your passwords, account names and numbers, and even to leave backdoors open on your computer for the recipient of the data to enter your computer.

Spyware in and of itself is not illegal, as long as they advise you that they will be sending back data to their site.  However, how many of us actually read or fully understand the license agreements that accompany any program?  We're just glad to have something else to play with.  So I guess you could say that it is our own fault that we are permitting these people to gather information about us, where we have been on the Internet, and using our resources to fulfill their mission.

What is this about using our resources?  That's right, you computer is recording information about where you have been on the Web, and it is your bandwidth being used to transmit this information.  Maybe that great little program you got has banners in it, even when you aren't on-line.  You can click on the banner to order whatever they are offering.  And the banners change regularly.  You are paying for the bandwidth, the loss of performance, and all the time you are sitting there waiting for your computer to boot, load an application, or respond to your commands.  Some of these program eat up a great deal of your available resources under Windows, and there is a strong tendency for them to conflict with each other.

What can you do to protect yourself?  There are several programs available to detect Spyware, or Adware, on your system.  I'm using a program called AdAware by Lavasoft, that will identify and remove the data transmission portion of these programs.  Of course, there is the potential that the program won't function properly after removing the data transmission portion of the program, but that is a choice you need to make.  Is the program worth enough to you give up your privacy and system performance?  At least with Adaware you have the option of deciding.

While you might think that giving up a little performance isn't going to hurt anything, we frequently see machines running in excess of 20 of these programs.  The System Tray runs most of the way across the task bar and booting the system takes longer than it takes Florida to count votes!  Why are we seeing these computers?  We are seeing them because the owner thinks the computer is running real slow!  I wonder why they would think that?  Is it because it takes several minutes to print a Web page?  Maybe it is because the configuration of the Internet Explorer or Outlook keeps changing?  Or maybe something just isn't right with their system.

Let us get a virus on our system and we would all be up in arms and rushing to remove it, even if it is a virus that doesn't have a payload, and just wants to reproduce.  "It's eating up my performance!"  But we don't think twice about giving up performance to Spyware!  Or maybe you just don't know what Spyware is, or the real price of that "free" software.

I'm not going to tell you what is good and what isn't that good.  You will have to make that decision.  To help you arm yourself, here are a couple of links you might want to look at.

Last Updated:  November 11, 2007