A brave CNet reporter purposefully installed spyware on his PC to see what would happen. The results were very mess. The reporter’s PC was hijacked and turned into an advertising machine, spewings ads not just at the reporter but also at the company’s internal network. The reporter, John Borland, was obviously less than pleased at the experience: “A Web site is a medium, and one expects to see advertisements contained inside the Web experience. The PC itself is property and the normal privacy and private-property laws should apply.”
Be sure to protect yourself from spyware. The #1 thing you can do is stop using Internet Explorer! Almost all spyware apps are targeted towards IE. Remove yourself from the target audience by installing either one of the Mozilla-based browsers (my browser of choice is Mozilla Firefox) or Opera’s browser.