Adware can be intrusive; spyware can take all of the fun out of being online.
The first line of defense against both is to be very careful with the informa-
tion you disclose to online sites. Why are they asking your age and income
level? If you are visiting a site to buy books, why do they want to know what
kind of car you drive? Give out as little information as possible, and pay spe-
cial attention to the little checkbox that most legitimate web sites present on
the information screen. It reads something like this: Check here to receive
valuable offers from our third-party partners. (Sometimes the checkbox lan-
guage is phrased in a very sneaky negative option: Check here so that you
don’t receive offers from our third-party partners.)
Laws on the books make it illegal for a web site to resell your e-mail address
or to place a program or a cookiethat identifies your personal information
without your permission. That doesn’t mean that some companies won’t go
ahead and do so anyway. And when it comes to spyware, this sort of program
is illegal from the get go.
Even if you take great care in denying permission to outsiders to place adware
or spyware on your machine, it can still end up your hard drive. And you’ll
rarely find these programs identified on your startup tray or in the list of pro-
grams that you can remove through the Control Panel. Instead, adware and
spyware can be concealed under phony names or hidden from view.
The solution here is to use a capable and regularly updated spyware/adware
removal tool. Several of these programs are available for free or as shareware.
(Shareware is free, but the developer will ask with varying degrees of inten-
sity for a contribution if you decide to keep and use the software.)
Among the best free tools are Spybot and Ad-Aware; you can find either by
going an Internet search for their home pages. Several commercial antivirus
and system utilities have expanded their products to include the ability to
hunt down and destroy unwanted guests. On my system I run Lavasoft’s Ad-
Aware SE; you can obtain a free copy for personal use by searching online.
In Figure 18-4 you can see an example of the report of 67,590 objects scanned
on my laptop.
These programs work by searching for known adware and spyware programs,
and by looking for new ones that contain particular types of information or
instructions. When they find a suspect program most will offer you the
option of quarantining the programs in a special subdirectory or deleting
them immediately. I recommend you use the quarantine option, at least until
you are certain that the removal program is doing its job properly. If you
quarantine a program that you later determine is important, you can bring it
back into action. Some especially well-hidden programs may require several
passes by the removal software, including reboots.
286 Part V: The Software Side of Life