p2pnet.net News:- Spyware is a nasty fact of life for millions of surfers. They don’t know how they got it, and they have no clue how to get rid of it.

Spyware, malware, adware violates your privacy. It buries itself in hidden corners of your system without you knowing about it, collects information about you and your online activities and then sends it to various recipients who use it for advertising, to compile spam lists, and for similar purposes.

It runs applications without your knowledge or permission, causes pop-ups to pop up, alters system settings and generally wreaks havoc, not the least of which is the tremendous frustration it creates as you try to figure out how to get rid of it.

But that may not be the case for much longer.

The Energy and Commerce and Judiciary Committees have each passed anti-spyware bills but, says the Washington Post, next week, there’s an excellent chance the bills will be combined and brought to the House floor for a straight Yes/No vote.

“People regardless of political affiliation are outraged about spyware,” it quotes Energy chairman Joe Barton as saying. “We’re beginning to get strong support from out in the industry. I think that’ll help us get close to 435 votes when this comes up on the floor.”

The commerce bill creates civil penalties ranging from $11,000 to $3 million per violation for offenses such as improperly collecting personal data, manipulating users’ browsers to divert them away from the Web sites they intend to visit or modifying their Internet settings, says the Post going on:

“Dropping a piece of adware on a single user’s computer without their consent could be an $11,000 offense. Miscreants who deposited programs capable of recording everything a user types on multiple computers could be hit with the $3 million penalty.

“Under the Judiciary Committee measure people who install programs on users’ computers without their consent could be jailed up to five years. The Senate measure … differs somewhat from the House commerce measure, but targets similar activities. Under an amendment approved today it also includes a criminal component.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2004 at 3:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 1611 times