Comet cursor keeps track of which websites your browser goes to. This is an indisputable
fact. Comet Systems, Inc. never warns you about this when you install Comet Cursor. They never do
anything to indicate that it does
anything but "
enhance" your web-browsing
experience. If you go to their
page to find out more about their collection of information, they have no formal
privacy policy, and they have some stuff
whining about how the
big bad media treated them
unfairly. They never explicitly say what is being
tracked, they never say why it's tracked, they never say what it's used for, and even more importantly:
They never say why they have the right to spy on people!
Even if they seem benign, and even if it
is totally anonymous (which it can't be, because they use a
GUID mechanism, and so all web-browsing is still lumped together as the same person, whether or not they know the name of that person), what gives
them the
right to use your habits as
their data?
When you sign up to be a Nielsen family, you are doing it voluntarily. You are quite voluntarily telling the networks which shows you like and which ones you don't. You know what information they have, and you asked to have your opinions count. Nobody coerces you into becoming a Nielsen family, and if you do decide to be one, you know exactly what information they're keeping track of and why.
Comet Cursor has no right to track peoples' web browsing habits without explicitly getting full consent. And they don't even try to say, "Oh, yeah, we collect information," either. All they say is, basically, "Oh, well, any information we track is still completely anonymous."
I know, I'm preaching to the choir here, for the most part, but it's a rant I had to make after seeing a whole buttload of sites with Comet Cursor on it yesterday and constantly being told, "Come, on, click yes, it's only a 10-second download!" and then having to worry about whether I'm clicking on the right button or not. (This was at work in MSIE as an ActiveX popup. I couldn't just close it.)
Ugh.