SPIES AMONG US
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Intrigued by the report, Smith, who played a major role in tracking down the creator of last year's Melissa virus, decided to investigate. Working out of his third-floor home office, he ran a little experiment. He fired up zBubbles and began surfing the Net; at the same time, he launched a program called a "packet sniffer," which examined the transmissions that were leaving his computer and going back over the Internet. He found they contained all kinds of information about him that zBubbles had culled as it trailed him online. What was in there? His home address, for one thing. It also sent back the titles of the DVDs he was considering buying on Buy.com. His computer was even relaying information about an airline flight he had booked for his 14-year-old daughter. "It was creepy," says Smith.

zBubbles has good reason for sending some of that information back to Alexa. To help with e-shopping, it has to know the sites a user visits and the products he sees there. But zBubbles apparently spies even when users aren't shopping: Smith was just double-checking his daughter's plane reservation when zBubbles grabbed the flight number and sent it home. "They're getting too much information," concludes Smith. "They design the product always to be installed on the screen, even though most of us aren't shopping all the time."

Officials from zBubbles declined to comment, since a complaint was filed by Smith with the Federal Trade Commission. A company-privacy statement online, however, insists zBubbles doesn't correlate any information it collects with individual users. While that might appear to lessen privacy concerns, Smith and others are concerned the information could be matched up with individuals if the company is sold — or if it changes its mind. In fact, the zBubbles usage agreement cautions that its privacy policy "may be changed by us in the future." Users, it adds, should "check the zBubbles privacy policy frequently for changes."

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