It has been long-established that not only does your "trusted" anti-virus software spy on you, but so does the Microsoft Windows operating system
itself.
When installing a machine between your computer and your internet connection, packet sniffers found often-transmitted pieces of data that seemed to be
unnecessary and oddly common.
A little bit of digging showed what programs were sending these packets and where they were going. What was found was that microsoft's web browser,
internet explorer, was searching the computer for installed software, and how often it was being used and sending this data back to microsoft.
Furthermore, a little reverse-engineering of ubiquitous programs like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint were searching within people's files for keywords
and usable information, encrypting key areas of user's file data, and sending this information to anonymous IP addresses over the web.
Information like this can be used for industrial sabotage, to gain insight into competitor's products, industry secrets, patent information... OR be
sold to the highest bidder of other parties which may be interested in such information.
Imagine spending years working on a product, a design, a patent, or a piece of written art only to find something very similar finding its way onto
the market some few months before your patent application was approved. Coincidence? Probably not. You might THINK your data is secure, but if you
use Windows, as the expression goes... "all your data are belong to us."
Moral of the story? If you use commercial software, YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT SAFE.
Is there a solution to this problem? YES!
Linux
edit on 30-3-2011 by 30_seconds because: clarity