Sears slammed for sneakily spreading spyware
By John Lister
The Federal Trade Commission has ordered Sears to immediately halt a program which effectively tricked customers into allowing the firm to install spyware. The retailer must also destroy all data it collected during the program.
The company, which covers both the Sears and Kmart chains, offered Web site customers $10 in return for installing tracking software. The implication was that the data collected would be for research into Web browsing activities.
In reality, the software collected details of all online activity, regardless of the sites involved. It even collected details from Web sites viewed over a secure connection. While it doesn’t appear any passwords or other log-in details were collected, the firm was able to get the information which appeared on screen such as the details contained in online bank statements.
The data gathered also included details about times and senders/recipients of e-mails, though not the content of the messages. The firm also tracked some offline activity and details of the computers involved.
To put things into context, that’s the level of detail which causes moral debates when legal authorities gather it in the course of an investigation. But whatever your view on that issue, it’s certainly not the type of data a business is allowed to collect without a customer knowing.
In its defense, Sears can argue that the extent of the tracking was mentioned in the terms and conditions which came with the installation package for the tracking software. However, the FTC ruled that the detail was buried away in a sea of small print. It’s certainly hard to imagine that anyone who did fully understand what private data they were giving up would have agreed to the deal, even with $10 at stake.
The FTC has now ordered Sears to destroy all the data it collected and stop using the software. It must also write to everyone who installed the software, explain what data was collected and tell them how to uninstall the software.
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