On Sunday, January 13, 2002, at 09:34 AM, profile wrote: > Just how good are these and can he learn what is on her computer, what > Web > sites she visits, the contents of her emails, etc. etc. > > Does anyone know much about these and what they can do...also, if she > were > to change to a MAC would that help. > I've been interested in these programs for quite a while. What they do is give a front end that searches all the public records databases they can get into. There's a lot of information that businesses and government agencies are tossing online for no good reason other than their own convenience. They are allowed to do this because we don't have strong privacy laws.
These programs don't track e-mail or surfing because to do so would require them to secretly place software on the user's machine, or at the user's ISP. Placing such software on a user's machine violates wiretapping laws. At the ISP end, it is unclear because it depends on the privacy policy of your ISP. (Who bothers to read that?) But, it's unlikely that an ex-spouse would be able to get such cooperation from a reputable ISP. E-mail does not have the privacy protection of telephone calls or regular mail, although it does have some. An ISP is permitted to read mail stored on its system, but pretty much everyone else is forbidden to do so. The privacy rights for e-mail are outlined in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. There have been a series of worms for Microsoft Outlook that can install a script that watches what you do and e-mails reports to somebody else. I know of no such worms that work on the Mac. There are also simple JavaScripts that, when embedded in HTML mail, allows someone who sends you that email to see what you wrote when you forward it with a comment to someone else. These will work in e-mail programs that have JavaScript capability, such as Netscape Communicator and Mozilla. They will probably work on the Mac, Windows, Linux and anywhere else that these programs run. Finally, in answer to your question, changing to a Mac wouldn't hurt because there are far fewer worms and trojans for the classical Mac OS, and none (so far as I know) for Mac OS X. It is extremely hard to install snooping software on a properly maintained Mac OS X system. But, changing platforms is unlikely to help in this case. --- Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville Phone: 502-852-6826 FAX: 502-852-7132 The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be January 22. For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
