Although computer use is growing and 800 million people are now online, more people are logging off.
Whether they are seasoned veterans, anxious newbies, or somewhere inbetween, users are fed up with viruses, spam and spyware.
Online shopping grew 1% in 2004 after growing 20% in 2003.

Spyware generally transmits information to third parties and sometimes takes control of a PC, usually to display ads. The most pernicious varieties have instructed millions of computers to make expensive toll calls or logged every keystroke on affected machines and sent account numbers and passwords to identity thieves.

No one is immune. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates discovered spyware on his personal machine not long ago.

The aggravation level has reached the point that some in the computer industry believe it threatens to undermine advances of the last decade, during which the Internet has grown from a virtually empty domain to a global community of 800 million souls. They say they need to act before the same early adopters who led mainstream Americans online lead them off.

“If, as an industry, we’re not able to provide a safe, reliable computing environment, we do think consumers will get increasingly frustrated,” said Michael George, general manager of Dell’s U.S. consumer business. “We’re concerned, and we want to get to a position where we play an instrumental role in fixing the problem.”

It is getting to costly for the average user to go through computer repairs, long distance calls for ineffective tech support, and collect all the different programs needed to keep out viruses spam and spyware.
And users can testify, that it doesn’t matter what they run and how careful they are, spyware is the last straw. The internet was built in an open collaberative way, and has been effectively hijacked by spammers, advertisers and criminals.

The biggest factor behind the rapid increase in spyware is the amount of money at stake. Ads for such blue-chip companies as Motorola Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and JP Morgan Chase & Co. appear in spyware programs.

The businesses most often accused of distributing spyware, including privately held Claria Corp., WhenU Inc. and 180Solutions Inc., say they are providing legitimate “adware” services to customers who approved the installation. But their disclosures are often misleading or buried: A recent Claria license ran for more than 60 electronic pages, first mentioning the phrase “pop-up” on page 18.

Much spyware arrives bundled with programs such as screensavers and file-sharing software.

“The part that worries me most is the tremendous amount of money that can be made by tricking people into installing junk on their computers,” said Ben Edelman, a Harvard graduate student who has testified against spyware companies. “It’s a great business.”

It is doubtful laws will do much to stop the proliferation of expense and annoyance for the consumer.

But 2004 “was a real turning point in a bad direction,” said technology analyst Ted Schadler of Forrester Research. “People are getting really angry. They’re angry at Dell and Microsoft and their cable providers, and that’s appropriate. They should be.”

We are.