In computer news this week,

Today the term Internet Privacy is an oxymoron; there is no privacy. Since the internet became the World Wide Web, the groundwork was layed for a lot of thing to happen, and not all of them were good from a consumer viewpoint.

In case you aren't already aware of it, there is no privacy on the Internet, unless you take a lot of security measures, which most people don't know about. Everywhere you go on the internet, you leave footprints. Everywhere you go, web sites collect information about you.

Over the past year I've done shows about the lack of internet privacy, and on the invasion of everyone's privacy on the internet, due to the basic design of the world wide web. As if everything that has happened so far isn't bad enough, now there's a new barrage of advertising and information collection coming at us known as Spyware.

Spyware - that's a new one. We've all heard of shareware; software you can download and us if you pay the price, and freeware; software you can download that's actually free. A lot of this software is really excellent, but I can guarantee you that Spyware isn't.

I just recently became aware of the term and the problem on Steve Gibson's site; GRC.com, which is the internet site I've done a few recent shows on regarding your computer's vulnerability to hackers breaking into your computer, and what you can do about it.

Now it seems there's at least one software company that has been attaching its own special tracking program to freeware and shareware programs and who knows what else on the internet. This program is an information collection program that supposedly scans your computer for certain information and then sends it back to the company, who then could sell the information to perspective advertisers. That means you could be bombarded with advertisements from companies who have received this information from your computer, yet you have no idea that you sent it to them, and it was certainly without your permission.

Spyware thus means software that spies on you and sends the information from your computer to advertisers. Another ominous feature of this new type of software is that if you remove or uninstall the original program it was attached to - the spyware program is not removed - it keeps doing its thing until you become aware of it and remove it, which of course you probably won't - because you don't know it's there.

At grc.com you can download a tiny program that will let you opt out of being a victim of spyware, and of course this program is named optout.exe. You can download this in a few seconds and run it. Right now it looks for the existence of the principal spyware program that has recently been discovered operating on the internet, estimated to have infected up to 20 million pc's.

But other similar type spyware programs are emerging. They install on your computer as part of another seemingly innocent program, and the next thing you know your computer is "phoning home" to advertisers without you being aware of it. You need to defend your self against this.

Nobody owns the internet, and caveat emptor prevails on anything you do on it and anywhere you go. This latest invasion of privacy is causing a lot of people to examine their internet usage, and take precautionary measures against all of the bad things that can happen to you while you're on it.

For Raw Bytes,

This is Frank Delaney