ABCNEWS.com : You Win the Loss of Your Privacy. Software at iWon Web Site Tracks Users Even After Removal Oct. 23 -- IWon.com offers prize money of up to $1 million to Web surfers who visit the Internet portal site and make it their homepage. But a chance to win money also means that members may be losing something more important: their privacy. [ ... ] The instructions at iWon's site advise members to use the add/remove programs function in the Windows operating system software if they wish to uninstall iWon's extra programs. But after performing the add/remove procedures and rebooting one of TechTV's computers, a software scan still found traces of the aornum program. Aornum had renamed some of its files "ornum" and hid the program deeper on the computer. Within minutes the program was attempting to send data. Our firewall logged the series of requests, noting aornum.exe as the offending malware. Especially disturbing is that iWon is a TRUSTe company, meaning it promises to publish a privacy policy and live by its tenets. Nowhere in the iWon privacy policy does it state that the spyware program will hide itself and continue transmission after you attempt to remove it. [Privacy Digest]
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