A Privacy International Harvard researcher has investigated a piece of “marketing software” from Sears and K-Mart and discovered that it contains incredibly invasive, brutal — and illegal! — spyware:
Sears offers members $10, and a chance to win one of several sweepstakes as an extra incentive to join the program.But in return, a small percentage of members must install extremely invasive software.
According to Googins, the product monitors not only all of the user’s Web traffic, but also keeps track of secure sessions such as visits to bank sites, sniffs through email headers, and then sends that information to a ComScore.
Link
(Thanks, Virtual Tours!)
(Image: Sears, Mónica, a Creative Commons Attribution-licensed photo from OmarOmar’s Flickr stream)