Security News > 2000 > September > AOL Removes Spy Feature from Netscape
See "New Cases" at http://www.a-g-s.com/ An amended Class Action complaint was filed on August 3rd against Netscape and America Online alleging violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and amends the original complaint, filed on June 30th. The Amended Complaint charges Netscape and AOL with engaging in covert surveillance of file transfers between Web sites and Internet users. It alleges that, whenever a visitor to a Web site uses Netscape's SmartDownload product to download a file, SmartDownload secretly transmits to Netscape the file name and location, along with an identification string unique to that Internet user. AOL has said that it never used the data generated by SmartDownload and that the purpose of the feature was to back up the operation of the software itself which would allow users to restart downloads that fail before completion. Nonetheless, it announced in early August that the feature would be removed. ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email LISTSERV () SecurityFocus com with a message body of "SIGNOFF ISN".