What is the catch with free screensavers?
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at
11:51 am
I get a popup window many times a day that offers FREE Screensavers. Some of them look great, but I wonder why are there so many "free screensavers" available on the web. What’s in it for the developers/marketers?
Tagged with: developers • free screensavers • google • marketers • popup window • script type • text javascript
Filed under: Screen savers
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Its spyware. Uninstall it, run spybot get rid of it.
Anything that looks attractive and is free on the internet is just spyware. Don’t install that crapware again, it might steal your passwords, bank account info etc.. (yeah that’s the catch)
For safe software downloads go to
http://download.com/
http://sourceforge.net/
Don’t trust any other random site on the internet.
no catch
There is a good chance its spy wear, or possibly even a Trojan. Either way it could give people access to information on your computer you probably don’t want them to have.
Now there’s a chance its fine but I would run a virus and spy wear sweep to be sure. As a rule, if its free there’s probably a good reason for it. Either someone thinks you’ll come back and buy something from them in the future if they give you a quick cheap deal or they want to get a hold of your personal information and sell it. Likely the latter.
Sometimes they are spyware and a good anti-spyware software is spybot, which you can download for free at http://www.download.com. I’ve been using it on my computer for years and it works great. Just make sure you update it about once a month.
Sometimes they are not spyware and they offer something for free to drive traffic to their site, so that they can make money off of another product or advertising.