Who benefits from spyware?
Unlike viruses, which are often a form of vandalism, spyware has commercial ends. Sometimes those ends are ethical, for example marketing, even if the means (spyware) are not. In many other cases, however, the ends – such as identity theft – are as dishonest as the means.
On the questionable end of the ethics scale are all those outfits that use spyware to target and deliver ads. As in the real world, marketing economies are based on generating 'eyeballs' that are counted and sold to advertisers or agencies that buy media space. All of the players involved in that economic chain – the company marketing its brand, the marketing agency working with the spyware company, the spyware company itself – stand to benefit economically from grabbing and tracking your 'eyeballs'. Some self-proclaimed legitimate spyware companies generate billions of page views and massive profits as a result of their intrusive and unwanted desktop hijacking and surveillance. Yet, their relative success is no justification for their deceitful tactics.
At the blatantly dishonest end of the scale, thieves looking to empty virtual bank accounts or rack up expenses on other people's credit cards also stand to benefit from spyware.
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