Free Services Scam
Beware of "Free Services" That Steal Personal Information
Some organizations are now offering "free services" such as Internet acceleration or e-mail virus scanning. BEWARE!! These organizations offer software that directs all of your web traffic through their servers. Your web traffic, including what you believe are secure communications, are decrypted, passed through that organization's servers, re-encrypted and then passed along to its final destination. This allows them to potentially view any information you send or receive through your web browser. This includes information that is universally considered to be personal and highly sensitive, including passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers.
This software poses a real threat to user privacy. Not only is your personal information passing through their servers, but loosely defined and/or liberal privacy policies allow them to harvest and share that information! They do clearly state as much in their end user license agreement and during the installation process. However, such organizations may be relying on the fact that many Internet users may not fully understand the ramifications of such a situation or that they hastily click through acceptance terms without reading the fine print of the privacy policy.
To make matters worse, efforts to uninstall such software may often fail, leaving a back door by the organization to take what are supposed to be private communications in the future.
