In most cases it’s difficult for customers to determine whether their anti-spyware tool has delisted anything and, if so, which adware it skips.

“When a spyware program gets listed, users won’t be aware of its presence,” says Harvard law student and spyware researcher Ben Edelman. The practice, he says, Offers spyware makers a new lease of life, letting them keep users who otherwise would have removed their software.

Degrees of Spyware

Of course, some spy ware apps are worse than others. One spy ware program may make severe changes to your computer’s settings, while an other merely displays ads.

Claria and WhenU are making the case that their hardware programs don’t resort to illegal tactics, such as exploiting security holes, to install themselves. And though this software can be annoying adware developers argue that merely being listed in an anti-spy ware scanner’s database tarnishes company’s reputation by linking its relatively benign adware application with far more harmful and intrusive spy ware programs.

According to Avinaider of WhenU, though some other adware companies will tract your web meanderings and sell that data. whenU’s privacy policy doesn’t permit it to tract the search queries that users type or the We pages that they browse.

Each anti-spy ware firm uses its own set of criteria to decide whether to remove or detect a file or registry key related to spy ware. Usually even a few bad behaviors suffice to red-tag a file as spy ware or adware.

Peter Mackow of Pctools, maker the of the spy ware Doctor anti-spy ware program, says that his company won’t publish the entire list of its criteria for feat that spy ware companies will use the information to design a spy ware application that skirts every rule. That is a position shared by many others who fight spy ware.

The Spy ware guys want a really rigid set of rules defining spy ware so they can then make an end run around (all of them) says Eric L. Howes, who tracks the spywarewarrior.com and consults for anti-spy ware- anti spy ware tools. The more you use, the likelier they are to counter the individual biases of each anti-spy ware company software companies.

Experts recommend that you employ two- or even three- anti-spy ware tools. The more you use, the likelier they are to counter the individual biases of each anti-spy ware company.