TIME EUROPE
July 31, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 5
Spies Among Us
More than 20 million people have downloaded programs that secretly snoop inside their PCs. Are you one of them?
By ADAM COHEN
O.K., maybe it does sound a little paranoid. But last year over the Christmas holidays, Richard Smith, a Brookline, Mass., software entrepreneur and freelance computer investigator, became convinced his computer was spying on him. It began after Smith had downloaded onto his laptop a nifty program he found called zBubbles, which is supposed to help people shop online. A product of Amazon subsidiary Alexa, zBubbles does some helpful things. When you're surfing e-commerce websites, it pops up and offers recommendations about products. And just like a good shopping pal, it even gives you comparative shopping advice about where you may be able to get a specific item cheaper.
There's a dark side to the program, though, that isn't nearly so friendly. While browsing an Internet-privacy newsgroup, Smith came across a posting from a zBubbles user who suspected it was snooping on him. The program supposedly monitored what users were doing online and discreetly reported back to Alexa.
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."
It's hardly a shock these days to learn that surfing the Internet isn't a private experience. Internet service providers have the ability to keep track of the sites you visit and the software you download. Websites use cookies — bits of data that can be stored on your PC — to keep a record of visitors. And the DoubleClick dustup, which erupted earlier this year when it emerged that the company was cross-matching information from its cookie-created user profiles with data it had acquired through its $1.7 billion purchase of the direct marketing company Abacus Direct, was a reminder of just how easy it is for companies to link the cookies you got by visiting different websites with off-line information about you to assemble a chillingly complete dossier, including everything from where you work to what kind of books and movies you like to buy .
But zbubbles is part of a new wave of privacy incursions that take Internet snooping to a new level: software that commandeers your computer to spy on you. This software plants itself in the depths of your hard drive and, from that convenient vantage point, starts digging up information. Often it's watching what you do on the Internet. Sometimes it's keeping track of whether you click on ads in software, even when you're not hooked up to the Internet. In Netspeak these programs are known as E.T. applications because after they have lodged in your computer and learned what they want to know, they do what Steven Spielberg's extraterrestrial did: phone home.
That may be the most paranoia-inducing part. E.T. applications use your Internet connection to deliver espionage briefings on you, often without your realizing it's happening. "If you're connected to the Net, it's easy for these applications to send a packet back," says William Cheswick, chief scientist at Lucent Technologies' new Internet-security venture. "It's one additional flash of the modem light. Who would even notice?" In fact, some E.T. applications have been uncovered precisely this way. People glance over at their computer and have a Sixth Sense moment: their modem light is flashing, indicating that information is being sent over their Internet connection, even when no one is seated at the computer.
Makers of E.T. applications say the privacy concerns are overblown. Most say that even if they are able to collect data about computer users, they don't connect them to individuals. Yes, they may have the capability to learn — even without your knowledge — that you are visiting porno sites or hiv Web pages. But, they say, they'll never connect any of that to you by name. Those promises don't assuage many privacy advocates, who say the data have the potential to be misused and, given the commercial value of individualized data, companies that collect them could change their policies at any time.
The stakes are ratcheting up quickly as we enter the coming wireless, portable-computer age. Before long our computers will probably be high-performance, handheld devices that know our physical location at all times and serve as our primary means of making purchases. If these pocket-size PCs have spies inside them, the capacity to monitor our lives will be virtually unlimited.
E.T. applications take advantage of a simple fact of Internet life: when we download software, most of us have no way of knowing what we're getting. We have to rely on the word of the company providing it — and of the software writer — that it does what it says it does and nothing else. "Any piece of software you download from the Internet is potentially a Trojan horse," warns David Kristol, a member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs. "You have no way of knowing what it's going to do."
That's what makes it so easy to spread computer viruses like Melissa, which traveled across the Internet in e-mail, embedded in innocuous-looking Word documents. It's what makes fraud so easy on the Net. A few years ago, the so-called Moldova scam lured users to free porno sites with such names as www.waysexygirls.com. When anyone downloaded a program that was necessary to see the way-sexy girls, it included Trojan-horse software, which unbeknownst to the user, hijacked the computer modem so that it dialed a phone number in the small East European nation of Moldova, charging the victim's phone bill at the rate of $3 a minute. MORE>>
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COPYRIGHT © 2000 TIME INC.
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July 31, 2000
SPECIAL REPORT
Spies Among Us
More than 20 million people have downloaded programs that secretly snoop inside their PCs. Are you one of them?
To Each His Own?
The answer's not clear when it comes to personal data. Ideas differ about how much control we need
EUROPE
The Final Reckoning
Businesses agree to compensation for wartime Germany's forced labor policies — but where's the money?
Sharing the Burden
German author Carola Stern talks about her call to share the compensation burden
A Nasty Tax Hangover
Sweden has one of Europe's lowest levels of booze-related illness — but now it faces an Absolut dilemma
Terror Reigns
Spain is rocked by a new wave of separatist attacks
Compensation Conflict
High politics and hidden treasure
MIDDLE EAST
Inside the Talks
How do you get Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak to sit together? Time looks at the long, hard road just to reach the Camp David summit
BUSINESS
Don't Call Us
Telefónica's controversial chairman gets the cold shoulder from many of his former friends
He's Having a Mall
J.W. (Joe) Kaempfer is bringing discount culture to the staid commercial enclaves of Europe
TECHNOLOGY
Stamping Out Mines
Two machines designed in the U.K. offer hope for safe and speedy removal of war's deadly leftovers
SOCIETY
What Money Can't Buy
In a scathing book, super-shopper Mouna Ayoub claims her life married to a rich Saudi was hell
THE ARTS
Valentino's Day
As the Italian designer rethinks his business plan for the new millennium, his loyal "Val's Gals" celebrate 40 years of gowns with a timeless appeal
Unleashing a Storm
Digital effects play the major role in this would-be blockbuster — and make a splash in others too
Wickedly Good Fun
Bubble, bubble, months of trouble: Cameron Mackintosh's new show, The Witches of Eastwick, casts its spell in London
Coming of Age in Chaos
In a haunting debut novel, Moses Isegawa looks at his native Uganda through the eyes of a young boy
The Waltz of Progress
A readable guide to economic history suggests that we may not be quite as well off as we think we are
DEPARTMENTS
Techwatch
World Watch
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