In the five years since the Windows 95 rollout, E.T. applications have proliferated. More than 22 million people are believed to have downloaded them. The real driving force is that in the mad race for eyeballs and click-throughs on the Internet, information about who you are, where you live and what your surfing and buying patterns are is becoming increasingly valuable. "These days grabbing personal data is often seen as a surrogate for value by venture capitalists and Wall Street," says Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters Corp., a privacy website.

There are hundreds of E.T. applications out there. Among the most popular: PKZip, shareware for compressing, storing and archiving files, and CuteFTP, widely used by the MP3 crowd to fetch music files. (Conducent, the company that embeds ads in PKZip and the current version of CuteFTP, says it sorts ad-view data only demographically and collects no personally identifiable information.) But even computer experts have trouble spotting E.T. programs. In some cases, they've come to light only when tech-savvy Internet-privacy advocates have picked apart the data streams moving in and out of their computers. That's how Smith blew the whistle on RealNetworks last fall.

RealNetworks makes the popular RealJukebox software, which lets users transfer music from the Net and their CDs to their hard drive so it can play on their computer. Smith noticed that when he put a CD in his computer, his music choice and his machine's unique identifier were sent back to RealNetworks. Since Smith had given RealNetworks his name and other identifying information when he registered his RealJukebox software, RealNetworks would be able to compile a database on what kind of music he was listening to. Under a fire storm of criticism, RealNetworks, which maintained it had no plans to correlate users' names with their musical tastes, nevertheless disabled its E.T. applications.

The most recent company to feel the heat over E.T. applications is Radiate, formerly known as Aureate. Radiate is an advertising company that works with the makers of shareware — software that can be downloaded free from the Internet. Shareware writers have long tried to support themselves by asking people who download their product to make voluntary payments. The problem was, few users paid up. Radiate's solution: placing ads on shareware. But these days the real money is in targeted ads that change to something else after they have been viewed once or that are matched to the interests and demographics of particular viewers. Radiate's ads‹placed on such popular shareware as Go!zilla and Free Solitaire — came with E.T. software that embedded itself in 18 million people's computers and used their Internet connection to report back on what ads people were clicking on.

Internet-privacy advocates were furious. They argued that tracking the ads someone clicks on is inherently invasive. Computer users may not want it known that they're clicking on ads for, say, cancer drugs or pornography. A worst-case scenario: this kind of sensitive information, gleaned from a computer user's home Internet surfing, could make its way to the person's employer.

Worst of all, the original version of Radiate's software, which still resides in countless computers, was written to keep phoning home even after the shareware that put it there was deleted. In other words, even after you uninstall its shareware version of solitaire, your computer could keep reporting back on you. Users needed a special tool to delete the file, which the company provided on its website only later, after an outcry from privacy advocates.

Radiate insists it did nothing wrong. It says it never identified individual users who went to particular sites. "The information is anonymous," says spokesman Peter Fuller. "All we would know is that user XYZ123 clicked on an ad." And, Fuller says, no specific information about users was passed on to advertisers. Still, Radiate had the capacity to learn and share this information had it so wished.

WRITE TO US | PRIVACY POLICY
Copyright © 2000 Time Inc.

TOP || HOME