Imagine that you need some information about diamond mining in South Africa. You do a search, see a likely site at the top of your favorite browser’s list, you click to go there and wait patiently for the site to appear. Suddenly you see an ad for an online jewelry business instead of the diamond mining site. What's going on? Has your browser started force-feeding ads to its users?
Nope. You've been hi-jacked by what many Netizens refer to as "scumware". It’s a new way to erode what little is left of your Internet privacy.
There are several different types of scumware, but they more or less work like this. An online business pays a fee to an advertising company. The advertising company hires a software developer to design a game or other bait to give away free on the Internet. Hidden inside the game is a small piece of code that loads itself onto your computer somewhere unrelated to the game so that it won't be removed if you uninstall the game later on. You pick up the game during your Internet exploring and download it. Later, when you perform Web searches the hidden software checks the key words you are using in your browser against a list of advertisers located back at its home office site. If there's something similar, maybe like diamond mines/diamond seller, the scumware hijacks your attempt to link with the correct site and reroutes you to the advertisement site.
One company known for this type of advertising is FlashTrack. In a recent article about scumware, Wired News quoted a message from FlashTrack saying that all their advertising customers are supposed to alert people that a copy of the FlashTrack advertising software is being downloaded and installed along with whatever other software the person is getting. The same article quoted a FlashTrack brochure as staying that there are over 3 million people with the FlashTrack software already on their computers. Since FlashTrack's software has no other function than to disrupt your Internet searches with ads, my personal opinion is that it is highly unlikely that anyone would knowingly allow it onto their computer. If you think that you may have an unwanted copy FlashTrack on your machine, you can remove it by finding a file named FTAPP.DLL and deleting it.
An even more common invasion of privacy is the Web beacon or single-pixel GIF.
Basically, it works like this. Every time you go to a new URL on the Internet your browser carries the URL of the previous page along with it as hidden information. This URL can be picked up and read by software on the new site or Web page.
A Web beacon is usually a graphic (a GIF) that is only one pixel square (a pixel is the smallest dot on a computer screen.) It’s made transparent so that it’s invisible. Every time you go to a page with a Web beacon on it, a special program on the site activates and collects data about where you came from and how long you stay on that page.
While scumware may have no socially redeeming value, Web beacons are fairly benign. Many of the best sites, like Yahoo, inform users in their privacy policy statements that they use Web beacons and what they use them for. You can even opt out if you'd rather they didn't watch you. Honest businesses aren't keeping track of you as an individual but are collecting general data about their customers and potential customers. They want to be able to tell how you got to their site to judge the effectiveness of Internet advertising. They also want to know which of their pages you visit and how much time you spend on each page. They can use the information collected by Web beacons to see what works best on their sites and what pages need improvement.
Paranoid yet? Think of it this way. The places you visit on the Internet are no more private than if you were in a shopping mall. Anyone in a mall can see what windows you linger at, what stores you enter and how long you stay in each. It’s no different in CyberSpace.
If you want to hide from prying electronic eyes, consider a trip to the Anonymizer home page (http://www.anonymizer.com/). Anonymizer sells several different security programs, including one that supposedly allows you to wander the Web without being seen by anyone. You can download a free limited copy or pay $50 to get a yearly license for the full version with all the extra features. In any case, it’s a fun site to visit and useful if you need to do research about security software and how much it costs.
How Internet privacy do you need? Only you can decide.