Re: Realnetworks is trojaning people...again!!!

From: Snorre Fagerland (snfat_private)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 00:45:19 PST

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    pedwardat_private wrote:
    <long message about Comet Cursor snipped>
    
    I fail to see how this is trojanizing you. The RealPlayer download page gives
    you three choices of which packages to download; two of which clearly contain
    Comet Cursor, and also provides a link to the Comet Cursor privacy page. It
    seems to be pretty clear to me.
    
    The CC privacy page is also pretty informative compared to a lot of adware out
    there.
    
    If the information they provide is correct they:
    
    - do not share data with outside parties
    - do not collect individual information. The info is used to count the number of
    individual users and cursor changes. As such, the data collected are purely
    statistical. They are monitoring how many users are using their software and
    where the users (as a group) are going.
    
    I am not going to be a great defender of the marketing forces out there, but
    there are privacy issues and there are privacy issues. I judge this to be a
    fairly defensible action from Comet Cursor. Of course, if they are gathering
    more information than they are actually saying, that would be something else
    altogether, but I have no reason to believe that is the case.
    
    If you are connected, and allow outside software onto your box,  that software
    can send information out. This will be more common in the time to come. Thing
    is, a lot of software that does this don't even tell you about it. The
    responsible software producers do, and I commed them for that.
    
    
    Snorre Fagerland
    Virus Analyst
    Norman ASA
    



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