• PC World
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If you lie awake at night fretting about personal privacy and your computer, consider this: The biggest threat may not be the government or the operator of the Web site you visited late last night, but your business partner, your boss, or even your spouse.

Products for monitoring desktop computers have been around for years. But until recently they were primarily designed for and marketed to large businesses that worried about employee misuse of Internet access and the company e-mail system. Now, a new wave of low-cost, easy-to-use monitoring products is available to home and small-business users. Dubbed snoopware, these products do everything their large-scale corporate cousins can--and in some cases, even more.

Spy on Them All

Advertising for these products makes their intended use crystal clear: "Secretly Record Everything Your Spouse, Children, and Employees Do Online," invites one firm. Another vendor promises to help "companies understand how employees use their computers, especially, how much time they spend for non-business purposes or in ways that could result in legal exposure for the organization."

PC World tested four snoopware products intended for home and small-business use: Insight, a $100 per seat product from Trisys; WinWhatWhere's Investigator ($99 for a single-user license); and SpectorSoft's EBlaster ($60 per package) and Spector 2.1 ($70 per package). Our conclusion: Though each does its job a little differently, all are extremely effective at surreptitiously recording activity on a computer, whether it's in an office or in the family room.

We also discovered that it's possible, though not easy, to determine whether you're being monitored. But unless you know just what to look for, and where (see "Countering Snoopware"), you may never know that someone else has been clandestinely observing your every keystroke.

Secret computer recording technology disturbs privacy advocates, who worry about possible abuse of spy software. For the moment, such software is virtually unregulated, and its use is spreading rapidly, especially in the corporate world. Earlier this year, an American Management Association survey of over 2100 member firms--many of them among the biggest in the country--found that 74 percent monitored employees' communications, including Internet use, e-mail, computer files, and phone calls (see the chart). That's more than double the percentage found in a similar survey in 1997.

Exactly how often snoopware monitoring occurs in small businesses and homes is unclear. But the rapid emergence of products targeting this market suggests that vendors see financial opportunity in people's mistrust of their own families and employees.