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Spyware is Watching You
By Stephen Bucaro
Advertising is getting far too intrusive and invasive. Advertisers that are weak in
ethics, and strong in grabbing for money, don’t see a problem with installing spy
programs on your computer without your knowledge.
In Internet Explorer’s "Tools" menu, select "Internet Options...". On the "Security tab"
click on the "Custom level..." button. If you don’t have the "Disable" or the "Prompt"
radio button set next to "Download ActiveX controls", I can almost guarantee that someone
has installed a spy program on your computer and is monitoring your web browsing activities.
Your Web surfing is being tracked and the data is being sold to third parties. These
thieves make big money selling your profile to companies who then target you for advertising.
Popup advertisements appear even when you visit web sites that don’t use popup windows.
The Lavasoft company keeps a reference database of all spy programs and provides a
free Windows program that scans your hard drive and registry for spy programs. Their
Ad-aware program lets you remove the spy programs from your computer.
At Lavasoft's website, select "Download"
in the "Support" menu. On the Download page scroll down to "Full install" and click on a
download source, (ie download.com). This will download the 1.45 Mb file aaw6.exe.
Double-click on aaw6.exe to execute the installation program (with Windows 2000,
first login as Administrator). The installation program puts an icon for Ad-aware on
your desk top.
Double click on the icon to execute Ad-aware. In the Ad-aware program window, click
on the [Scan now] button. On the "Preparing system scan" page click on the [Next] button.
Ad-aware takes a few minutes to scan your hard drive and registry for spy programs
and data tracking cookies. On my system it returned the results:
44 objects recognized
1 Registry key identified
43 files identified
When the scanning is complete, click on the [Next] button. This takes you to the
"scanning results page" which displays a list of objects found. One object found on my
computer was "Alexa Data Miner". Then click on the [next] button. A dialog box appears
asking if you want to remove the objects. Click on the [OK] button to delete the spy objects.
The free Ad-aware Standard Edition removes spy software and data tracking cookies
from your system. The $27.00 Ad-aware Plus Edition adds real-time monitoring and
blocking to the program. Not only can you remove spy programs from your computer, but
you can also BLOCK them from invading your system in the first place! I found Ad-aware
easy to install and use, and very effective.
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