popularity-contest spyware! :)

[Lee Braiden]

On Tuesday 18 October 2005 20:31, Jason Straight wrote:
> I was surprised to see this package while searching for POP daemons with
> synaptic. While it doesn't really bother me personally I am a little
> dismayed that such a package would be installed by default w/o users
> knowing. This is borderline spyware as a standard install.

Well, if you install packages over the net, rather than off cd, then you're 
basically giving away this information anyway.  That doesn't mean that it's 
collected, though.  I doubt that popularity contest tracks your software use 
and assigns it to you a personal identifier that represents you and could be 
used for advertising or something like that.  It's just for keeping track of 
how popular different packages are, as the name suggests.  A valid concern, 
though.

-- 
Lee Braiden
http://www.DigitalUnleashed.com