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About Spyware

More broadly, the term spyware is applied to a wide range of related adware products which are not spyware in the strict sense. These products perform many different functions, including the delivery of unrequested advertising, harvesting private information, re-routing page requests to illegally claim commercial site referral fees, and installing stealth phone dialers.

While spyware and adware usually won't effect your network settings, they can hog system resources and considerably slow down your system. We recommend that you keep anti-spyware and anti-adware software on your computer and up-to-date at all times. (If you have a Macintosh computer, you do not need to instal anti-spyware or anti-adware programs.) This can ensure that your computer will keep running smoothly and also acts to help prevent future problems.

Two programs that we recommend for finding and deleting spyware and adware on your computer are Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy for Windows. Both are free downloads.

Spyware

An Introduction to the Parasite Economy

Gorling, Stefan, "An Introduction to the Parasite Economy" . EICAR 2004 Conference Proceedings, U.E. Gattiker, ed.

"This paper gives an introduction to a number of immoral business-models that have been established as a part of the Internet-economy. It discusses how breaking into computers has become a viable business model for corporations and how the Internet underground is challenging our view of what a company is. The paper tries to group a number of similar business models such as spyware, adware, viruses, spam, etc. under a common term, parasites, and discuss how they are a part of viable business-models rather than merely an annoyance to the computer users."

Spyware and the Limits of Surveillance Law

Bellia, Patricia L., "Spyware and the Limits of Surveillance Law" . Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 20, 2005

"For policymakers, litigants, and commentators seeking to address the threats digital technology poses for privacy, electronic surveillance law remains a weapon of choice. The debate over how best to respond to the spyware problem provides only the most recent illustration of that fact. Although there is much controversy over how to define spyware, that label encompasses at least some software that monitors a computer user's electronic communications. Federal surveillance statutes thus present an intuitive fit for responding to the regulatory challenges of spyware, because those statutes bar the unauthorized acquisition of electronic communications and related data in some circumstances. Indeed, those who argue that no new federal legislation is needed to address the spyware problem rely in part on the opportunities for criminal prosecution and civil suits under surveillance statutes and related doctrines.

As the debate on the need for new federal legislation proceeds, however, there is good reason to question whether federal electronic surveillance statutes can successfully combat anything but the most extreme forms of spyware. Electronic surveillance law does not apply by any reasonable construction to many forms of spyware. Moreover, the overall record on application of surveillance law statutes to a variety of digital-age problems is in fact quite mixed. Courts have reached privacy-protective outcomes on very bad facts, but have also let seemingly problematic practices pass unsanctioned.

The difficulty with efforts to apply surveillance law statutes to new privacy problems is that our federal electronic surveillance statutes are emphatically not general data privacy statutes. Unfortunately, efforts to treat them as such have produced a body of confused - even incoherent - case law. That case law, moreover, tends to make many impediments to application of surveillance law seem technical rather than structural or conceptual. To that extent, it diverts attention from important policy questions, including whether Congress should consider legislative solutions tailored to specific privacy threats (such as spyware), or whether broader data privacy statutes are necessary or appropriate.

This Article uses the difficulties of applying electronic surveillance law statutes to spyware to illustrate the broader limits of surveillance law. Current case law suggests that electronic surveillance statutes are likely to constrain only the most egregious forms of spyware, and there may even be some difficulties in surveillance law performing that limited task. Efforts to use surveillance law to push for more privacy-sensitive industry practices are likely to fail altogether. My predictive judgments may be controversial, partly because surveillance law is sufficiently unstable that there is room for courts to adopt approaches that are more privacy-protective. I thus consider whether courts should use surveillance law to respond more aggressively to privacy challenges such as spyware. Drawing upon case law from other contexts, I show that there is good reason to be wary of using surveillance law as a vehicle for addressing various information privacy problems. Indeed, if electronic surveillance cases were to more plainly expose the limits of surveillance law, they would generate a more fruitful legislative debate about the propriety of true data privacy legislation, whether broadly or narrowly conceived."