Background
In a computerized setting, such as the Internet, there is a wide variety of privacy threats to consider. Threats vary from the systematic capture of everyday events (e.g., what online sites that are visited or what items that are purchased from online stores) to the mass marketing based on the retrieval of personal information (spam offers and telemarketing calls are more common than ever) to the distribution of information on lethal technologies used for, e.g., acts of terror.
Today, software-based privacy-invasions occur in numerous aspects of Internet usage. Spyware programs set to collect and distribute user information secretly download and execute on users’ workstations. Adware displays advertisements and other commercial content often based upon personal information retrieved by spyware programs. System monitors record various actions on computer systems. Keyloggers record users’ keystrokes in order to monitor user behavior. Self-replicating malware downloads and spreads disorder in systems and networks. Data-harvesting software programmed to gather e-mail addresses have become conventional features of the Internet, which among other things results in that spam e-mail messages fill networks and computers with unsolicited commercial content. With those threats in mind, we hereby define privacy-invasive software as:
Read more about this topic: Privacy-invasive Software
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