Spyware from my ISP?
I had a laptop to repair from a fairly regular customer the other day. This was a customer who’d recently sold his business and gone to Florida for a few months to begin his retirement. While there, he signed up with a local broadband company for his Internet access.
He’s running Ad-Aware, on my recommendation, and while he was there, he noticed that it would no longer complete a scan, or do any definition updates. When he got back from Florida, he brought the machine in for me to have a look at, as he was a little concerned, and rightly so.
Well, starting a scan with Ad-Aware showed a few items that it had discovered, but it froze partway through, after it started scanning files. One of the items it discovered was a program that was running. I’ve seen plenty of cases where some spyware will actively try to prevent anti-spyware applications from running properly. Viruses do the same thing, killing anti-virus software, so this isn’t really anything new.
I started another scan, and stopped it partway through before it got to the point where it froze. The scan results showed the running spyare program was an Internet Explorer toolbar. I did a little bit of digging around on the system, and it turns out this toolbar was installed with the software that his ISP in Florida provided.
Yes, you read that right. His Internet provider was installing spyware as part of their software package.
Can we trust anybody nowadays? We pay someone to give us access to the Internet, and the first thing they do is stick spyware on our machine? Although, considering 90% of computers have some type of spyware on them, and the Internet is full of it, I suppose they could argue that they were just providing the full Internet experience.
At what point do we say enough is enough? When do we say that this corporatist view of profit above all is crap, and we won’t stand for it anymore?
His system is clean again, now, and he’s going to avoid that ISP like the plague if he ever goes back to Florida. But how do they justify doing this to their own customers? The customer pays them money to provide a service, and before the customer has even used it, they’ve already been sold out to advertisers and data collectors.
Disgusting.