Spy Ware

[DCook]

While browsing the Internet, you will find lots of useful tools that you can download for free. Programs like P2P file share programs (Kazaa, Limeware, etc..) and browser enhancement tools that add new features to your browsers toolbars like Hotbar, Yahoo etc... Also, downloading assistance utilities like Gattor. You need to understand that these programs may seem legit and provide handy features but they are NOT really free. You will pay the price because they are going to steal information about you and sale it to the highest bidder. For example, the more of these utilities you use, the more junk email and junk snail mail you will receive. Some are so bad that they even have the possibility to collect your credit card number, get your on-line banking information, etc…

If you look at it from the business point of view, they can make more money selling your information than they can for selling the software. For example, if you sale the software you might get a few thousand people to pay for it and then maybe a few hundred more people to buy upgrades but if you give the software away, you have the possibility of getting personal information from millions of people. So, what information do they want to collect that would be saleable? Most important, your email address and home address. Email address list can sale from 25 cents to 65 cents per address to advertisers. When you are talking about millions of email addresses you can see that it adds up very quickly and is a multi-million dollar business. So a lot of companies want to get into this market producing a lot of useful utilities. Next step is how can the companies compete on selling this information. Well it would be more valuable if they can not only supply you email and home address but also what things you are interested in, like what web sites do you visit, what software do you have installed on your computer. Now the junk mail that comes to your email and snail mail is targeted just for you. These companies will argue that this is done to minimize the amount of junk mail / email you will get because they send ads for products you may be interested in. This just isn’t true. We as consumers are mostly impulse buyers and they know that. That means the advertiser needs to blanket you with all of their ads for that impulse buy.

I know what your thinking, I will just give them fake information. Well guess what, these companies devise ways to get around this. Easy way to see if your email address is correct, they send you a junk mail with a link in it stating that they are complying with latest email spam laws and are providing you a link to click on to unsubscribe from their email list. You click on the link that then auto-generates a message back to them that you want to unsubscribe but what you really have done is told them that yes they have your email address and it is a valid email address. Now that information is more valuable because it has been confirmed as a TRUE VALID email address. New companies have started up that now will auto-generate every name possible to send email to and wait for you to click on the link to un-subscribe to get your TRUE VALID email address. So you can see now why junk mail now dominates your mailbox.



So, how can I protect my self? First is to be aware of the programs that spy on you. There are hundreds of sites available on the Internet that can provide you with lots of information. To get you started, check out these two sites:

http://www.cexx.org/adware.htm
http://grc.com/


For every one of these utilities that you use, there is a safe solution. People all over the world work on software and utilities that you can download for free and are safe. It is called the Open Source solution. You can find all of these same type of utilities and more. Here are a couple of places to look for open source solutions:

http://sourceforge.net/
http://freshmeat.net/

[berthy]

ok thanks for theses link

______________________
problemes informatiques

[ahz]

Since our office started using Firefox a few years ago, we've had 0 incidents of spyware, adware, malware, viruses, etc.