How to deal with 'Adware' intrusion

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta

It's been a rather contentious few weeks. In the beginning of April, Australian company Sharman Networks ignited a firestorm when it became known that users of its highly popular Kazaa Media Desktop application, one of the leading P2P (Person to Person) file sharing programs on the internet, had also installed software that could connect users to a another "private" network called Altnet, operated by a company called Brilliant Digital, a partner of Sharman Networks.

Then, Newsbytes (www.newsbytes.com) reported that a popular privacy program is being silently deleted when users install a third-party multimedia player. They confirm that installing RadLight (www.radlight.net) version 3.03 deletes Lavasoft's (www.lavasoft.de) Ad-Aware program, as stated in a warning in Radlight's lengthy license agreement.

The latest version of Radlight, version 3.03 Release 5, no longer has automatic Ad-Aware removal functions.

So what is going on? Why are there so many "adware" (cynics call them "spyware") software milling about? What exactly do they do? Do internet users really need this?

"Adware" software pays for itself in the form of online advertising that is combined into the program. The user can download and use the application for "free" after answering a few demographic questions (or registering) and viewing ads in a special window.

The software-maker can obtain revenue from the amount of ads that are displayed in the software as well as "click throughs", which are the number of times a user clicks on an ad.

However, some privacy advocates have reservations. This new crop of adware sometimes does not tell the user precisely what it is doing to their computers. They charge that these "spyware" applications could monitor user surfing habits in order to send targeted ads. Some even speculate that spyware can even take control of computers by launching a secret Trojan Horse program.

Considering that adware utilizes the user's Internet connection without their knowledge has some activists up in arms. The application could log all the Internet sites that the user has gone to (say CNN or the BBC) and report to a centralized database that could then put up a special ad offering a news magazine at a special price. Worse, they could put your name on a mailing list that could then be sold to news publishers.

But that's no problem, right? If you don't like the program, you can always uninstall the program and the adware/spyware problem will go away, right?

Not really.

The latest crop of adware has the logging features on a separate application, which is installed in addition to the main software. If you uninstall the software, the adware monitoring characteristic could still churn quietly in the background, acting like a Trojan Horse program.

To totally ensure that your system is free from adware or spyware programs, use the aforementioned Ad-Aware. It is an easy to use program that will find and remove questionable programs safely from your system. And it's free.

But be forewarned. Removing the adware or spyware features from your system may cause the core software that you downloaded to crash or cease functioning. You may have to uninstall that application as well.

File sharing users should also be wary of the latest crop of "Adware Free" programs. These are P2P applications that have been cracked by computer hackers to do away with the "spyware" features they deem intrusive. But then it comes down to a matter of trust.

Do you trust the originating company who informs you of their intentions in a 2,000 word End User License Agreement (EULA) that you will never read? Or the "goodwill" of the hacker, who may or may not have installed a Trojan horse of their own? By the way, distributing hacked programs are not exactly legal.

Shouldn't software companies have a revenue stream to recoup their investment? Can't advertising help build up the Internet as it had done for radio and television in the form of ratings and sponsorship dollars?

Perhaps. It is, however, important for users to know just what kind of information (if any) is compiled on them. As well as what exactly do these applications do to their computers. Users should read the privacy policies and terms of service of each software or website carefully to find out exactly what is expected.

Why do companies resort to Adware? For control of your desktop? Access to your advertising preferences? Or domination of your personal computer? As always-on internet broadband becomes more common, having control of thousands if not millions of idle computers can open many possibilities for marketing, sales, distributed data processing or taking over the world.

But then again, that's just my paranoia talking. But it could happen. Right?