Privacy-invasive software

Privacy-invasive software is a category of software that, whether malicious or not, invades its user's privacy to gather information about the user and their device without prior consent or knowledge. The data collected by privacy-invasive software is often used commercially, in which case, the data is either sold to advertisers or to other third-parties. 

Background
On online environments, such as the Internet, a diverse array of privacy threats exists. Defining privacy is subjective, encompassing elements of robust security, seclusion, the concealment of sensitive information, confidentiality, and the freedom from interference or intrusion.

Information privacy involves the right to exercise control over the collection and utilization of personal information, specifying who collects or acts upon it. For many individuals, particularly the youth and a significant portion of the current generation, discussions about privacy often revolve around concerns such as election theft, data breaches in electronic voting systems, ransomware attacks targeting major businesses and stock markets, wearable technology, social networking, and missteps in targeted advertising. Notable incidents like WikiLeaks and the Snowden revelations, along with various whistleblowing activities and privacy-intrusive actions, including online scams, contribute to the multifaceted landscape of privacy concerns.

These concerns span a spectrum of severity, ranging from tracking user activities (such as visited websites and purchases) to mass marketing based on personal information retrieval, leading to an increase in spam offers and telemarketing calls. Privacy invasions extend to the dissemination of information related to lethal technologies, employed in acts of terror, espionage, or malicious intent.

Malicious intent is present in practices such as the use of spyware and identity theft. Individuals may leverage spyware to alter their identity or intrusively monitor potential victims with the aim of causing harm, financial loss, or undermining social status. Spyware facilitates the extraction of personal information and behavioral patterns from victims, streamlining identity theft.

Today, software-based privacy invasions manifest across various facets of internet usage. Spyware discreetly downloads and executes on users' workstations to collect and distribute user information. Adware, often based on personal data retrieved by spyware, displays commercial content and advertisements. System monitors record diverse actions on computer systems, while keyloggers capture user keystrokes to monitor behavior. Self-replicating malware spreads haphazardly on systems and networks. Data-harvesting software has become a commonplace feature of the Internet, contributing to the inundation of networks and computers with unsolicited commercial content, using techniques such as collecting email addresses.

Problem with the spyware concept
In early 2000, Steve Gibson formulated the first description of spyware after realizing software that stole his personal information had been installed on his computer.

Spyware is any software which employs a user’s Internet connection in the background (the so-called "backchannel") without their knowledge or explicit permission.

Other terms for similar software include thief ware, scum ware, track ware, and bad ware. It is believed that the lack of a single standard definition of spyware depends on the diversity in all these different views on what really should be included, or as Aaron Weiss put it: "What the old-school intruders have going for them is that they are relatively straightforward to define. Unlike those hay-days, nowadays spyware, in its broadest sense, is harder to pin down."

Despite this vague comprehension of the essence in spyware, all descriptions include two central aspects. The degree of associated user consent, and the level of negative impact they impart on the user and their computer system (further discussed in Section 2.3 and Section 2.5 in ). Because of the diffuse understanding in the spyware concept, recent attempts to define it have been forced into compromises. The Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC) which is constituted by public interest groups, trade associations, and anti-spyware companies, has come to the conclusion that the term spyware should be used at two different abstraction levels. At the low level they use the following definition, which is similar to Steve Gibson's original one:

In its narrow sense, Spyware is a term for tracking software deployed without adequate notice, consent, or control for the user.

However, since this definition does not capture all the different types of spyware available, they also provide a wider definition, which is more abstract in its appearance:

Difficulties in defining spyware, forced the ASC to define what they call Spyware (and Other Potentially Unwanted Technologies) instead. This includes any software that does not have the users' appropriate consent for running on their computers. Another group that has tried to define spyware is a group called StopBadware.org, which consists of actors such as Harvard Law School, Oxford University, Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems. Their result is that they do not use the term spyware at all, but instead introduce the term bad ware. Their definition thereof spans over seven pages, but the essence looks as follows:

Both definitions from ASC and StopBadware.org show the difficulty with defining spyware. We therefore regard the term spyware at two different abstraction levels. On the lower level it can be defined according to Steve Gibsons original definition. However, in its broader and in a more abstract sense the term spyware is hard to properly define, as concluded above.

Introducing the term "privacy-invasive software"
A joint conclusion is that it is important, for both software vendors and users, that a clear separation between acceptable and unacceptable software behavior is established. The reason for this is the subjective nature of many spyware programs included, which result in inconsistencies between different users' beliefs, as what one user regards as legitimate software could be regarded as a spyware by others. As the term "spyware" came to include increasingly more programs, the term got hollowed out, resulting in several synonyms, such as track ware, evil ware and bad ware, all negatively emotive. We therefore choose to introduce the term privacy-invasive software to encapsulate all such software. We believe this term to be more descriptive than other synonyms without having as negative connotation. Even if we use the word invasive to describe such software, we believe that an invasion of privacy can be both desired and beneficial for the user as long as it is fully transparent, e.g. when implementing specially user-tailored services or when including personalization features in software.

The work by Warkentiens et al. (described in Section 7.3.1 in ) can be used as a starting point when developing a classification of privacy-invasive software, where we classify privacy-invasive software as a combination between user consent and direct negative consequences. User consent is specified as either low, medium or high, while the degree of direct negative consequences span between tolerable, moderate, and severe. This classification allows us to first make a distinction between legitimate software and spyware, and secondly between spyware and malicious software. All software that has a low user consent, or which impairs severe direct negative consequences should be regarded as malware. While, on the other hand, any software that has high user consent, and which results in tolerable direct negative consequences should be regarded as legitimate software. By this follows that spyware constitutes the remaining group of software, i.e. those that have medium user consent, or which impair moderate direct negative consequences. This classification is described in further detail in Chapter 7 in.

In addition to the direct negative consequences, we also introduce indirect negative consequences. By doing so our classification distinguishes between any negative behavior a program has been designed to carry out (direct negative consequences) and security threats introduced by just having that software executing on the system (indirect negative consequences). One example of an indirect negative consequence is the exploitation risk of software vulnerabilities in programs that execute on users' systems without their knowledge.

Comparison to malware
The term privacy-invasive software is motivated in that software types such as adware and spyware are essentially often defined according to their actions instead of their distribution mechanisms (as with most malware definitions, which also rarely correspond to motives of, e.g., business and commerce). The overall intention with the concept of privacy-invasive software is consequently to convey the commercial aspect of unwanted software contamination. The threats of privacy-invasive software consequently do not find their roots in totalitarianism, malice or political ideas, but rather in the free market, advanced technology and the unbridled exchange of electronic information. By the inclusion of purpose in its definition, the term privacy-invasive software is a contribution to the research community of privacy and security.

History
As personal computers and broadband connections became more commonplace, the use of the internet for e-commerce transactions involved considerable amounts of money. Early retailers included book dealer Amazon.com and CD retailer CDNOW.com, which both were founded in 1994. As competition over customers intensified, some e-commerce companies turned to questionable to entice customers into completing transactions with them.

The birth of spyware
In the search for more effective advertising strategies, these companies soon discovered the potential in ads that were targeted towards user interests. Once Targeted advertising began to appear online, the development took an unfortunate turn. Some advertisers began to develop software that became known as spyware, collecting users' personal interests, e.g. through their browsing habits. Over the coming years spyware would evolve into a significant new threat to Internet-connected computers, bringing along reduced system performance and security. The information gathered by spyware were used for constructing user profiles, including personal interests, detailing what users could be persuaded to buy. The introduction of online advertisements also opened a new way to fund software development by having the software display advertisements to its users. By doing so the software developer could offer their software "free of charge", since they were paid by the advertising agency. Unfortunately, many users did not understand the difference between "free of charge" and a "free gift", where difference is that a free gift is given without any expectations of future compensation, while something provided free of charge expects something in return. A dental examination that is provided free of charge at a dentist school is not a free gift. The school expects gained training value and as a consequence the customer suffers increased risks. As adware were combined with spyware, this became a problem for computer users. When downloading software described as "free of charge" the users had no reason to suspect that it would report on for instance their Internet usage, so that presented advertisements could be targeted towards their interests. Some users probably would have accepted to communicate their browsing habits because of the positive feedback, e.g. "offers" relevant to their interests. However, the fundamental problem was that users were not properly informed about neither the occurrence nor the extent of such monitoring, and hence were not given a chance to decide on whether to participate or not. As advertisements became targeted, the borders between adware and spyware started to dissolve, combining both these programs into a single one, that both monitored users and delivered targeted ads. The fierce competition soon drove advertisers to further "enhance" the ways used for serving their ads, e.g. replacing user-requested content with sponsored messages instead, before showing it to the users.

The arms-race between spyware vendors
As the chase for faster financial gains intensified, several competing advertisers turned to use even more illegitimate methods in an attempt to stay ahead of their competitors. This targeted advertising accelerated the whole situation and created a "gray" between conventional adds that people chose to see, such as subscribing to an Internet site & adds pushed on users through "pop-up adds" or downloaded adds displayed in a program itself. This practice pushed Internet advertising closer to the "dark" side of Spam & other types of invasive, privacy compromising advertising. During this development, users experienced infections from unsolicited software that crashed their computers by accident, change application settings, harvested personal information, and deteriorated their computer experience. Over time these problems led to the introduction of countermeasures in the form of anti-spyware tools.

These tools purported to clean computers from spyware, adware, and any other type of shady software located in that same "gray" area. This type of software can lead to false positives as some types of legitimate software came to be branded by some users as "Spyware" (i.e. Spybot: Search & Destroy identifies the Scan Spyware program as a Spybot.) These tools were designed similarly to anti-malware tools, such as antivirus software. Anti-spyware tools identify programs using signatures (semantics, program code, or other identifying attributes). The process only works on known programs, which can lead to the false positives mentioned earlier & leave previously unknown spyware undetected. To further aggravate the situation, a few especially illegitimate companies distributed fake anti-spyware tools in their search for a larger piece of the online advertising market. These fake tools claimed to remove spyware, but instead installed their own share of adware and spyware on unwitting users' computers. Sometimes even accompanied by the functionality to remove adware and spyware from competing vendors. Anti-Spyware has become a new area of online vending with fierce competition.

New spyware programs are being added to the setting in what seems to be a never-ending stream, although the increase has levelled out somewhat over the last years. However, there still does not exist any consensus on a common spyware definition or classification, which negatively affects the accuracy of anti-spyware tools. As mentioned above, some spyware programs remain undetected on users' computers. Developers of anti-spyware programs officially state that the fight against spyware is more complicated than the fight against viruses, trojan horses, and worms.

Predicted future development
There are several trends integrating computers and software into people's daily lives. One example is traditional media-oriented products which are being integrated into a single device, called media centers. These media centers include the same functionality as conventional television, DVD players, and stereo equipment, but combined with an Internet connected computer. In a foreseeable future these media centers are anticipated to reach vast consumer impact. In this setting, spyware could monitor and surveillance for instance what television channels are being watched, when/why users change channel or what DVD movies users have purchased and watch. This is information that is highly attractive for any advertising or media-oriented corporation to obtain. This presents us with a probable scenario where spyware is tailored towards these new platforms; the technology needed is to a large extent the same as is used in spyware today.

Another interesting area for spyware vendors is the increasing number of mobile devices being shipped. Distributors of advertisements have already turned their eyes to these devices. So far, this development has not utilized the geographic position data stored in these devices. However, during the time of this writing companies are working on GPS-guided ads and coupons destined for mobile phones and hand-held devices. In other words, development of location-based marketing that allow advertising companies to get access to personal geographical data so that they can serve geographically dependent ads and coupons to their customers. Once such geographic data is being harvested and correlated with already accumulated personal information, another privacy barrier has been crossed.