There's no such thing as spyware... It's user personalization

I found this story on Wired.com about the transformation of Gator into Claria. It gives a new insight into what people think about spyware and how the assholes at ex-Gator, now Claria, are combatting it. Makes you think about those not so innocuous toolbars that MSN, Yahoo! and Google are trying to dish out. I don't know where I found the intelligence never to install them.

This makes me think that the Internet is a big political bandwagon. They basically operate on the same principle, don't they... The web business people.

Think about it. What would you think would be the perfect democratic system? A place where you would be a part of every decision made, and also, where you had the choice whether or not to make the decision, and where, at some time you had the choice to reverse your decision. Now those things are not practical except in one case... when you are the entity about whom you're being democratic. That means when you're making decisions about yourself

If you still don't see where I'm tying all this in, listen to this. If you installed some software, and you weren't careful enough to scroll through the entire license agreement and read it, and lets say this software said in its license agreement that at an arbitrary time in the future it would decide to format your hard disk.... God, wouldn't you be fucked!!!

And that's what most spyware does. It takes advantage of the fact that you don't read the license agreement and consequently goes on to install a bunch of stuff that will gather information about how you surf the web, what things you buy, what sites among a group of competetors you visit more than others, and generally being quite a spy. Then it goes and sends all this information to the "Mother Ship" that then proceeds to use this information to deliver advertisements to you.

Now if you're like me, you'd never click on a popup ad. No matter how good it sounds. If you were like my mother, you wouldn't be able to resist. And there you start falling into the hole. The non-intrusive text ads that google places on your web pages are still harmless enough. But banner ads and popup ads... never. Clicking on those means that you're paying for web content. And that's a thing that you should never need to do. The only payment you need to make for web content is that you make for going online.

So take a hint. Move to firefox, quit IE, quit all toolbars, quit those desktop helpers, quit those wallets. Remember your passwords, or let Firefox remember them for you, use the google search box in the Firefox browser to search, instead of the deadly toolbar. Try to take control of what your computer is doing. Install AdAware and other such utilities. Install a good virus scanner and firewall... And take control of your PC.