Remember the city of Troy and that cool wooden horse they got for free? Sometimes unwanted and unknown strings can be attached to supposed free services and software. You can fight back with a little knowledge and some free tools.
In the beginning, free Internet services and free software were made available by individuals because they wanted to share and they thought it was cool to give something away. Then some entrepreneurs figured out that they might be able to make money by bundling advertising with the free services and software. That looked like it was going to work pretty well for all involved until the ad market became much more difficult. Out of desperation to make free services and free software pay off, adware and spyware were born.
There are companies that do their best to get programs installed on your computer to help them make money. Adware is a type of program that displays ads just like those on most commercial Web sites, but they are controlled by the program instead of by visiting a Web site. Some of these programs are not a problem, because they make it obvious that viewing the ads pays for a free piece of software. They only run when you are using that particular program. The nasty ones are those that are set to start whenever you start your computer and serve ads even when you are not running the ad supported software you chose to install. Most of the bad adware keeps running even when you uninstall the software it came with.
Spyware is program code that tries to gather information about you and relay it to the company that distributed it. The more benign of these watches what sites you visit and where you shop on the Internet in order to create a marketing profile. The most evil ones may attempt to capture credit card numbers and other sensitive information.
At the best, these programs are an annoyance. At worst, they are a severe security risk. Aside from their intended purposes, they can also have other effects. Since they run every time you boot your computer, they can cause slowdowns, and software conflicts which can make your computer less stable.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to make it less likely that adware or spyware gets installed on your computer. There are also ways to detect and remove the programs if they are already there.
