What is spyware?
Spyware is designed for spying mostly. It's add-ons that come bundled with freeware. These add-ons agents common come from large advertising or data mining companies. Spyware collects various information and sends it to the main server. In the most cases the collected information is not sent to the third parties but only to advertising company.
How harmful is it?
A different breed of spyware is doing the rounds on at least 7 in 10 computers to various extents. They come as an ActiveX applet. They use ActiveX applet because it can't be displayed on Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser technology, as Microsoft companies products are the most popular and almost everyone is using Microsoft Windows. If you already have spyware latched onto your system, here's what can can happen:
- Your bowser's setting might be changed
- Your start page might be changed once or much more times without opportunity to change it back.
- Changed start page might bring more spywares to your system.
- Your search preferences might be changed.
- You will be flooded with pop-up ads.
- All sites that were brought to you, might bring you more troubles, like viruses or worms.
- You computer will run more slowly than ever before.
- Strange systems dialogues might appear, that will pronounce about huge errors and or system problems.
- Some dangerous spywares can even crash the system.
Trying to delete files that contain spyware, you may cause even more problems, because spywares like to bundle with other important softwares, and after you remove spywares, those programs will no longer work.
You can cause a crash of system yourself, if you delete spyware files without manual removal instructions, because you might delete very important system files, like win.exe in Windows system.
Why should I remove it?
If you don't mind when some information about your systems and usage gets transmitted and recorded, you may keep it. And you should also don't be afraid of identity theft, carding, phishing, dialing, etc. But all this is only from a privacy point. There's other, technical side in this case.
Commonly spyware runs on your system and it doesn't need that software with which it comes to your PC. It can run all alone when it's installed. And after you uninstall the software, it still remains running!
If spyware has bugs, it's a real disaster for your PC, because it might cause unexpected crash of the system.
So spyware might cause much more problems than privacy threat or effect system's stability.