Download Accelerators :: Spyware

Spyware – many times it’s software that comes for free, but carries a rather nasty way of paying its creators. Ad companies pay the authors of the program to include spyware with the program that is installed on all the users’ computers, and displays banner ads, or worse. For some reason, download accelerators (programs that claim to make things download faster) are particularly likely to contain spyware. You can check if a particular program comes with spyware or not by typing its name into the search engine at www.spychecker.com. You can also run a program to check and see if you have spyware.

What’s more, many of them are horribly out of date — they have a few techniques to get extra performance out of ancient 56k modems, but nothing to offer the modern broadband user. Obviously the companies responsible for the so-called accelerator programs go out of their way to hide that fact.

The spyware that often comes with these programs often sends statistics and personal information about you back to the ad company, so that they can target ads at you. Because you would be using the download accelerator to download programs, some companies have done deals where they even track the files that their users have downloaded using cookies and sell this data on to ad companies, who use it to measure what kind of programs are most popular and increase the advertising for those types.

Needless to say, you probably aren’t too pleased if this has happened to you. If you suspect that your computer might be infected with spyware, you should visit one of the software programs to clean the spyware out of your PC.