Related Resources • Virus Encyclopedia • Glossary of terms

From Other Guides • Adware - Spyware - Beware! • They Really ARE Watching! • Privacy in a Nutshell

Like many evenings, I was drinking coffee and shooting email back and forth with friends. Suddenly an email from Breaking News slid into my inbox with the subject line "Osama bin Laden Captured". For just a moment it felt as if my heart stopped. Could it be? A second look indicated this was not a legitimate news story but rather someone's idea of a joke intended to market what the security industry often refers to as "spyware". The gist of the offering was a free tool to supposedly bring "fun" to my desktop for free - provided I agreed to the Terms and Conditions of their privacy policy. Though smart enough to know adware when I see it, the privacy policy intrigued me so I hopped over to http://www.wotch.com/info/legal/privacy.asp to take a close read.

The first thing I noticed was the prominent Truste Privacy Seal. Allegedly the Truste Privacy seal ensures "When you see the TRUSTe seal, you can be assured that you have full control over the uses of your personal information to protect your privacy." After carefully reading The Wotch Network Privacy Statement, I was left wondering just who interprets the term "full control". Bill Clinton, perhaps?

According to Principal 1 of the privacy policy, "The Wotch Network asks for your name, age, gender, country origin, zipcode and e-mail address and may later request other demographic information." Principal 2 assures the reader that the information will only be shared with third parties as outlined in their privacy statement and Terms and Conditions. Ironically, Principal 3 simultaneously promises not to send unsolicited email and (in the same breath) states "The Wotch Network will automatically subscribe users to all new content newsletter streams as they are developed and will from time to time expose subscribers to promotional offers that we think will be of interest to The Wotch Network subscribers." Forgive me for being dense, but that certainly meets my interpretation of "unsolicited". But I digress.

Reading the rest of the agreement - including their "Frequently Asked Questions" section - reveals The Wotch Network not only transfers all personal info (collected in accordance with Principal 1) to the originator of any promotional offers to which users might respond, but they also share this same info with their "marketing partners" at their discretion. The Wotch Network Terms and Conditions sums it up nicely, "The Wotch Network partly earns its' revenue from building these e-mail databases and e-mail newsletters for other content publishers and they may sell them along with their subscription base i.e. the users full data and information."

Keep in mind that not only the personal information you willingly provided is at stake. The cute little desktop tool - the one that promised to bring "Five Minutes of Fun" to your desktop - collects what they refer to as "demographic information". It does this by collecting "traffic data" and, according to The Wotch Network, "may entail the use of 'Cookies' 'IP addresses' or other numeric codes used to identify a computer."

So is this tool, filename 5MOF.exe, a virus? No. A Trojan? Maybe. The literal definition of a Trojan is a program that does something other than the user expected and is generally accepted to be malicious. If a user didn't understand the implications of the program and would ordinarily object to their surfing habits being monitored, the definition might fit. In any case, it does meet the security industry's standard definition of Spyware.

Ironically, The Wotch Network assures you that the "Five Minutes of Fun" tool is free. But at what price?