New Spyware Products Crossing Line of Privacy

[Dover]

New spyware products: crossing line on privacy

John Schwartz/NYT NYT Saturday, October 11, 2003

Rick Eaton, founder of the company TrueActive, decided he had no choice. In an unusual move in the world of technology, he made his product weaker.
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TrueActive makes a computer program that buyers can install on a target computer to monitor everything that the target computer's user does.
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Spying with software has been around for several years, but Eaton decided that one new feature in his program crossed a line between monitoring and snooping. That feature is called "silent deploy," which allows the buyer to place the program on someone else's computer secretly via e-mail, without physical access to the machine. To Eaton, that was an invitation to install unethical and even illegal wiretaps.
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He removed the feature, he said, "so we could live with ourselves."
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Such principles seem almost quaint in a market where the products seem to grow more powerful and intrusive all the time. Other makers of "snoopware" - as opposed to the software known as "spyware" that many businesses use to monitor the activities of Web site visitors and to send them pop-up ads - enthusiastically pitch their products' ability to be installed remotely. They typically skirt the ethical and legal issues with fig-leaf disclaimers and check-off boxes in which buyers promise not to violate the law.
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Privacy specialists are not buying such arguments, however. Marc Rotenberg, who heads the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, contended that selling software that can tap people's communications without their knowledge violates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
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"I don't think there's any question that they are violating the federal law," he said. The disclaimers, he said, "fail the straight-face test."
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Law enforcement officials seem to agree....>> MORE

http://www.iht.com/articles/113315.html