The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.
Oh, damn, I recall that motherfucker now that I look at the picture. I was a kid back then and had no context of it being spyware.
I stand corrected in my original comment.
> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.
Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.
Amusingly, it still seems to be available for download (and requires a whopping 16 MB of RAM): https://bonzibuddy.org/download.html
Digital Convergence tried to do similar with the CueCat, a low-cost barcode reader that had a hardware serial number and for which the official software to drive it required you sign up for an account with them, giving them PII. When people figured out how to neuter the serial number and encryption in hardware, DC invoked the DMCA.