BonziBuddy
Bonzi Buddy is an on-screen software agent from BONZI Software. It is a well-known example of spyware, with computer speed, privacy, and ease of use all affected by installing the program. When someone installs Bonzi Buddy, his or her homepage gets set to www.bonzi.com.
Bonzi Buddy can be installed automatically without user knowledge or consent via an ActiveX object in Internet Explorer.
The user interface is a purple ape that swings across the screen. The ape tells jokes, reads facts, sings songs, checks the user's e-mail, and delivers voice advertisements. The interface used to be a green parrot, but was later changed to the ape interface. Children often install Bonzi Buddy, seeing the program as a fun toy instead of as an advertising program.
The Bonzi Buddy application uses Microsoft Agent technology to display the Bonzi ape on-screen and provide text-to-speech capability.
Many people are skeptical of Bonzi Buddy because it installs quite a lot of spyware. There are many free replacements for Bonzi Buddy without the spyware.
A class action suit was brought against Bonzi Software on December 4, 2002 due to its Banner Ads that appear to be Windows computer alerts, alerting the user that their IP Address is being broadcasted. This deceptive advertising was meant to trick the user into installing Bonzi Buddy. A settlement was reached on May 27, 2003. Bonzi agreed to modify their ads so that they looked less like a Windows dialogue box and to make them more obviously advertisements. Incidentally, using a computer on the Internet without taking very specific precautions will, generally speaking, provide that computer's IP address (or the IP address of the local network's gateway) to the operators of sites being used (as well as to recipients of email messages). This of and by itself is a fairly minor security concern, though the IP address is required to conduct certain attacks against the computer.
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