Adware Report: Hotbar Spyware
Hotbar is a program that embeds a toolbar into your browser. It monitors every URL that you visit as well as phrases which you enter into search engines and sends this information back to a third party. The information is used to target ads on your computer, both in popups as well as directly embedded within web pages.
Hotbar consumes over 20MB of disk space on your hard drive. It will slow down your browser, make your PC boot slower, and may crash your computer altogether. Hotbar also disables certain popup blockers.
Hotbar can be forcibly installed when you visit certain websites, whether or not you agree to the download.
Related Links
'Hotbar' spyware program bedevils Windows and should be removed
Hotbar description from Howard University
From the Hotbar terms of use:
"Hotbar works with third party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our web sites and use the Service, including the toolbars. Two of these third parties are DoubleClick and Engage. Such companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to our and other web sites and use of the Service, including the toolbars, in combination with non-personally identifiable information about your purchases and interests from other online and offline sources, in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. In addition, we share web site usage information about visitors to our web sites and users of the Service, including the toolbars, with such companies for the purpose of managing and targeting advertisements and for market research analysis on our web sites and the Service, including the toolbars. For these purposes, we and our third-party advertising companies may note some of the pages you visit on our web sites, and through use of the Service, including the toolbars, through the use of pixel tags (also called clear gifs). In the course of serving advertisements, our third-party advertisers may place or recognize a unique "cookie" on your computer and, in some cases, collect data through the use of cookies. To find out more about DoubleClick's information practices and to know your choices about not having this information used by this company, please go to www.doubleclick.net/us/corporate/privacy. To find out more about Engage's information practices and to know your choices about not having this information used by this company, please go to http://www.engage.com/privacy/.
"Hotbar, from time to time, may work with email direct marketers such as Netcreations to offer users the opportunity to subscribe to various email newsletters subscriptions. Please read such marketers' privacy statements before entering your email address or any other information into their subscription window."
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