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Spyware in Kazaa, Limewire, Grokster

Posted by michael on from the comp.risks dept.

BigMacMike writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle (via the sfgate.com website) has a story that Kazaa, LimeWire, and others have secretly hidden software in their applications that track users' browsing habits." Not the first time. The corporate response is that they literally didn't know what was in these secondary applications that they were providing to be downloaded and installed alongside their primary program. Believe it if you wish.

3 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Double Edged Sword... by Cheshire+Cat · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Free music has a price, and it's really not all that bad if your computer doesnt have anything REALLY incriminating on it


    This is frighteningly similar to the arguement that if you have nothing to hide, why, you won't mind the police searching your house. Its not the fact that I'm trying to hide something, I just feel that its an intrustion of my privacy when programs report my activities to a third party.

    --

    Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
  2. SaveNow Must Die! by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    There's all kinds of nasty spyware and adware out there, but the one that raises my blood pressure is SaveNow/WhenUShop. This is supposedly a voluntary opt-in system, but some program (probably BearShare) installed it covertly on my system and didn't remove it when I uninstalled.

    The lost of privacy was bad enough, but SaveNow seems to work by hooking into Windows Explorer and intercepting a great many application events. For a long time I blammed the resulting performance hit on a combination of my own excessive system tweaking, buggy Explorer plugins, and MS software bloat. It wasn't until Explorer froze up totally that I realized some background process was interfering with it, and found the culprit by process of elimination.

    It strikes me that this is not very different from activities that have gotten people sued or even arrested. It's all there -- unauthorized access, theft of services, malicious action. Perhaps it's time we gave Mister Ashcroft a call!

  3. You installed that spyware. by toofast · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A friend of mine worked at webHancer for a while. Trust me, there's a nice dialog that:
    1. tells you what webHancer is
    2. tells you what webHancer does
    3. asks you if you want to install audiogalaxy with or without it.

    I've installed audiogalaxy several times, and all you have to do is uncheck the check box. But most people click "Next" without even reading the dialogs.

    You consented to it. That doesn't make it spyware, it makes it ignorantware.