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Friday, June 02, 2006 1:58 PM PT Posted by Harry McCracken
Comet Cursor Controversy
When you publish an article called "The 25 Worst Products of All Time," you don't expect folks responsible for the products in question to write you thank-you letters. So it didn't come as a complete shock when we got a complaint from someone involved with one of our picks. That someone was Jamie Rosen, co-founder of Comet Systems, the company behind the Comet Cursor--#16 on our list.Rosen had several beefs with our take on Comet Cursor, most notably the fact that we said it "introduced spyware to an ungrateful nation" and that it "secretly" installed itself when you visited certain sites or installed programs such as RealPlayer 7. He said that Comet Cursor never spied on its users, and that it was never installed secretly.
Did Comet Cursor, which debuted in 1997 and died earlier this year, qualify as spyware? It's a tricky term, since there's no universally agreed-upon definition. (Here are a bunch from Google, each slightly different.)
Clearly, the software wasn't remotely as pernicious as many applications that anyone would deem as spyware. Its behavior was at most irritating--unless you're the kind of person who likes having your cursor turn into a tiny image of Garfield, in which case it wasn't annoying at all. And the information it "phoned home" to Comet Systems was innocuous and wasn't tied to a specific person: According to Rosen, it consisted only of a unique identifying number tied to your PC and a tally of pages you visited at Comet Systems' partner sites, both of which were used for accounting purposes rather than to track individual users. (The version of the program distributed with RealPlayer lacked the unique identifier.)
"We never collected information on our users," Rosen told me. "People who got spam couldn't blame us, because us we weren't collecting e-mail addresses."
But by his own account, not everyone who had Comet Cursor on their computers knew it was there or that it was sending any information at all about their online activities back to Comet Systems. In fact, the program could wind up on PCs without any human intervention, if a user visited a Comet partner site using a copy of Internet Explorer that had been set to automatically accept all ActiveX applets.
Even so, Rosen said it was never the company's intention to be sneaky: "We were playing by the rules of ActiveX." And he says that the RealPlayer version that installed Comet explained it was doing so and allowed users to opt out.
Once installed, Rosen conceded, early versions of the applet sent data back to Comet Systems without explaining what they were doing. And because Comet Cursor had no publicly-available privacy statement, there was no way for users to know that data was leaving their systems.
Later, the company addressed some of the issues with early versions of Comet Cursor, said Rosen: It posted a privacy policy that spelled out what information it was transmitting, and tweaked its installation process to make it clearer that Comet Cursor was being installed.
The bottom line here is this: I don't think it's unfair to call a program spyware when it can land on a computer without the PC user knowing about it, and when it transmits information about the user's online activities without giving notice or providing a privacy policy. That's what Comet Cursor did at first. But in response to Rosen's statement that Comet Systems never intended to deposit Comet Cursor silently on the machines of people who didn't want it, we've amended our story's description of how the software got onto PCs.
Whatever Comet Systems' intentions, a lot of people seem to have ended up with its software in the late 1990s without wanting it or knowing how it got there. Me included: I still remember being baffled and nonplussed by the site of my cursor turning into a cartoon character. When I discovered I had a program called Comet Cursor on my PC, the notion that it could have gotten their without me knowing about it came as a surprise; this was before "drive-by installations" and bundled software were widely used to get advertising software onto PCs.
Like I say, many bad actors have used such techniques to do things far worse than anything that Comet Cursor did. But a person's PC is a profoundly personal thing. And so I'm not the least bit surprised that some users found that the early versions of Comet Cursor amounted to a minor but real privacy violation--because that's exactly how I felt.
To this day, if you do a Web search for "Comet Cursor" you'll find a long trail of commentary from people who were surprised--and unhappy--to find it on their computers. I asked Rosen for his thoughts on why so many PC users seemed to end up with his product on their systems who didn't expect it or want it.
"I can only think people weren't paying attention," he responded. "We were talking about tens of millions of downloads...if only a small percentage were unhappy, that's still tens of thousands of people." He also said that Comet has gotten flack out of proportion to whatever mistakes it made: "We get the brunt of the attack, but other companies were far more obnoxious."
In his own defense, he said that Comet Systems was na?ve about what it was doing: "We thought we were staying away from radioactive privacy practices." If the company was starting up today, he said, it would do things differently.
What's Jamie Rosen up to today? He's chairman and founder of Memorystone, a startup that publishes keepsake books of digital photos. After all the heat he took over Comet Cursor, he told me, he decided to enter a business with as little potential for controversy as possible.
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Cometastic.
Any program that surreptitiously gathers information about me, or anything I do, or anything that happens on my computer, without having been explicitly installed by me, and that sends that information across my Internet connection without my explicit consent, whether my name or any other personally identifying information is included or not, is spyware. My definition is no more narrow than that. I don't even want a program to check for updates unless it asks my explicit permission, and if any program I use has that feature but doesn't allow me to say "yay" or "nay", I'll either firewall it, or dump it.
Whatever words may be used to skirt around legal or defacto definitions are completely irrlevant to me, and I will not permit such software on my computer, and if found, I will from that point actively campaign against it, and will very likely never use it again, even if it "evolves" into something that might actually be innocuous.
I know that's pretty strong, but it's better safe than stupid, and I'd rather do too much than do too little; the former is easier to reverse.
Arguing over the technicality of the name is spurious. It did things to a users computer that they didn't want.
CRM Filter: A CRM software blog
For Jamie Rosen to claim that he and his company caught flack that they didn't deserve is the most preposterous statement I have ever heard. As a "victim" who has had to "eliminate" comet cursor tens of times, all I can say is "shame on you" for taking advantage of unsuspecting people. Mr. Rosen: We were paying attention; its just that we were too trusting and didn't know about the technical mechanics of the internet to fall prey to crooks like you. If there was a product that deserved the "worst ever" label, Comet has to be it.
how do you delete this i would really like to know as i am one of you that got this and i sure don't want it i woulld appreciate any info on how to get rid of this contraption once and for all
Theresa, It's not easy to get rid of.. but it needs to be cleaned out. Your best bet is to go to the experts in spyware removal and let them talk you through it.
Go to the forums at
http://spywareinfo.com
They get bombarded alot, so be patient ;)
Best
Bruce
I hate comet cursors for all the work I had to do to remove them from all our corporate PCs. Never had them on my PC though, I used Opera all through the comet years so no ActiveX. (Still on Opera with a bit of Firefox...)
To be fair though, they are playing by the ActiveX rules. And their behavior pointed out a big flaw in ActiveX in IE - letting unknown web sites run things in your PC! Now, who's fault is that?
Maybe we should also blame ourselves for being ignorant on security at that time (even now..). We should at least thank Jamie Rosen for pointing out how many people using PCs are just not PC-literate enough to care about security...
OF COURSE ONLY A PERCENTAGE SEEMS UNHAPPY, JAMIE... THE REST OF THE MILLIONS DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THAT IT WAS NOT A STANDARD PART OF THEIR OS!!!!!
I concur with Hohum having worked in the computer sector and sales for a few years, a good 98% of the people who I have encountered simply dont understand anything about a computer.
They open attachments from people they dont know, visit links sent to them in some form of instant messages from random people, install all kinds of cr@p on their pcs and why? because they dont know any better.
I remember the battle this was to get rid of. Keeping the family pc clean was such a hastle... I eventually went to the extreme and bought a program similar to Norton Ghost and simply reloaded the image every time i got stuck with this (and other programs)
OOPS! I didn't know I wasn't supposed to like Comet cursors. When I first saw the site, I thought they had some of the cutest cursors I'd ever seen! Of course that was many, many years ago, before I knew there were other cursors besides the ones that came with MS Office and Windows 95 and 98, that were out there and free for the asking. So, I innocently downloaded and kept them, (Comet's cursors), on my hard drive AND on rewriteable CD's. Of course that was "way back" - before I knew about companies secretly saving your info - and evidently before Comet knew I was able to save their cursors and email them to myself at work so I could use them on my employer's PC at work without having to run the whole Comet program on that machine. So I guess some of us were using Comet without THEIR permission! Or at least that's what I thought...maybe they didn't care if I saved the cursors for later use, I don't know. I just know that I can use those cursors when ever I want to on any PC I put them on and I don't have to use Comet for anything else. Later, after one of many crashes on my first PC, (a Gateway), I tried to download and save them to my hard drive again, so I could put them on another CD, (just in case something happened to the first CD), and ... oops again! I couldn't do it. I guess someone at Comet caught on. But, it didn't matter, because I found the first CD I'd saved them on and reloaded them onto my reformated hard drive. Now I can use their cute cursors but I don't have to put up with their annoying hi-jack search engine. I hated that thing! Every time I would try to use Google or IE's search engine, the Comet searcher would take over. I'm on my second PC now, a Dell, the first was a Gateway. I feel that I've learned way more than I should have had to learn about PC's, and how to install new hard drives, modems, power sources, CD burners, CD-ROMs, RAM, and I can't even remember what all I had to install in that Gateway. The Gateway crashed more times that I can even count. The Dell has only crashed once, about 3 weeks ago. I hope it didn't have anything to do with my using Comet cursors without downloading that little app they made you use. I haven't searched for Comet lately, but I guess there's no need according to what I've seen here.
I'm not so sure I'm willing to let Comet Cursor off so easily. Well they may have been playing by the "ACTIVEX" rules, I've always questioned the manner in which Comet Cursor dug itself into your system.
So many registry entries and pieces placed in various locations on your hard drive to the point it was all but impossible to remove. I always wonder why for all the denials Comet never made a removal tool for it's software.
I can't count how many computers I've worked on in the past 10 years that were "infected" by Comet Cursors "software", causing the computer to run VERY slow, if able to run at all.
Mr. Rosen, you should be ashamed of yourself!
Worst tech product ever, IMO.
I remember the hassle of trying to uninstall Comet Cursor from hundereds of machines that had gotten the download unknowingly and it was a horrific experience. It bogged down the machine to the point of uselessness and was a tech's nightmare to deal with. I also vaguely remember that Comet Cursor was one of those installs that 'warned' you it was about to install and the message was written in such a way that the user would have to answer yes to mean no, which is how it ended up on so many machines. But I'm sure this was just bad grammar usage and not done intentionally at all...having just purchased the Brooklyn Bridge, I'd believe anything!