Comment by canyp
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.
At the time, that sort of behavior was expected in almost anything you downloaded, it really was perhaps even more invasive than today. Java was infamous for installing a search bar on your browser and making it hard to not “accept” it.