[GroovBird]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

While I appreciate your support in stating that Pocket PC Thoughts wouldn't distribute spyware, I don't really agree with your opinion of cookies. I've never seen or heard of an instance where a simple text file could do anything that real spyware can do. Cookies can only do one thing, and that one thing isn't malicious or even capable of generating income for the distributor of the cookie, which is certainly a defining characteristic of spyware. The attitude of "cookies are evil spyware" is what I'm trying to dispel, but you seem to think otherwise. If you have some proof, I'd love to see it!

The original meaning of the term spyware is software that is secretly installed on your computer along with some "freeware" that silently monitors your surfing habbits and reports it to some advertizing company to further enhance their effectiveness in targetting the right demography for certain products.

Then that software became more intrusive and took over people's computers. Start pages, search pages, pop ups and so on starting annoying people. Still they used the term spyware for that kind of software.

But cookies can and are used to track people's habbits. And when that information about where YOU surf is collected, merged, and available for inspection without your consent then that's an invasion of your privacy. Hence cookies can be used as "spyware".

Whether tracking what ads you've already seen to avoid annoying you is a "service" or "spyware" is another discussion altogether. I think it's applaudable that an advertizing company tries to reduce the nuisance factor of ads by removing redundant ads.

But the question here is can and are cookies used as "spyware" as in "invading your privacy". And yes, I think they are.