Microsoft's antipiracy tool Spyware?
Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications, is designed to validate whether a copy of Windows has been legitimately acquired. However, it also checks in with Microsoft on a daily basis.
This has alarmed some people, such as Lauren Weinstein, a civil liberties activist, who likened it to spyware in a blog posting.
Microsoft sais that WGA's regular call home is innocent and done for necessary maintenance purposes. "The WGA Notifications program checks a server-side configuration setting to determine if WGA should run or not," a company representative said in an e-mailed statement. "As part of the pilot, this gives Microsoft the ability to disable the program if necessary."
Microsoft acknowledged that it has not been forthcoming enough about the antipiracy tool's behavior, but countered that its tool is not spyware, since it is not installed without a user's consent and has no malicious purpose. Still, Microsoft is considering several options to make its actions clear to the user, including amending the software license, the company representative said.
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