I disagree lizking.. Extreme techs article was biased in respect that they claimed this was a wanted feature.. (who wants data to be sent to some third party, without their knowledge/or obscured in the depths of their user agreement.. Let alone data that is easily deciphered even the biased writer admitted that..)
(btw i skim my user agreements on everything but the average joe does not and agrees his/her rights away.. hence preying on the naive, imo is wrong..)
Really disturbing is the fact that your unique identifier is used when signing up for newsletters giving them the full piece of the pie... (note they claim they errored their user aggreement when Richard Smith busted them)
Now they have ID and a email and it doesn't take a brainiac to dertermine how this could be abused.
Did you know Microsoft Word has metadata also..
Thats how they caught the mellisa virus writer (rightfully so he was a dumb arse.)
My suggestion is dont trust anything that is not open source.. Transparency is the only solution..
Or invest in a control that stops network traffic at the application layer of the OSI model...
Hence a firewall with unique encrypted md5 checksums for each program allowed network access... Sygate, Tiny etc...
2 cents..
DoctorYo
