Maybe this is common knowledge to people but it concerns me. im going to copy an email i sent out to some friends after a conversation with aol techsupport and ill include a link to the conversation i saved and uploaded to my websever.


I use aol 8 along with my cable connect and all of a sudden this program Spyzapper program is popping up telling me its scanning for spyware. So I get on aol live tech support and start asking about it. They went thru 3 tech support people trying to avoid my questions. So in the end I find out the Aol spyware protection program program which is seperate from the Spyzapper program, ships with aol 9 and is automatically runnning by default to scan your pc once a week from the time of installation of the aol software and you cant disable it. You CAN uninstall it if you know its there . The spyzapper program CAN'T be uninstalled but it can be disabled . Disabling Spyzapper doesnt stop the AOL spyware protection program from continuing to scan your harddrive. I told the tech I didnt install spyzapper on my AOL 8 ver, and eventually was able to get him to admit that spyzapper is integrated through one of their automatic background uploads to update all versions of aol above ver 6 and is enabled by default with out your knowledge , other than the brief popup window in the corner of your screen you see for a few seconds whenever you sign on. Is this thing common knowledge to everyone? you can decide how to take it I guess.

transcript http://myweb.cableone.net/gusvoss/aol conv.txt

i didnt save the first session with the first tech person i talked to :( so this is the next session.

All the more reason to not use AOL. Do you really use it for anything else than web browsing? Their software is SUPER bloated, has little to no advanced features, and you are really not as safe as they claim they make their software. If you have broadband, you are already paying seperate for that, so why not just get a free e-mail address, AIM, and lose the AOL.

There are alot of reasons not to use AOL, I would list them but then I could find myself with a legal suit.

However I could suggest whats "rumoured":
(Disclaimer: Rumours are but rumours.)

* AOL is preportion of AOL Time Warner, therefore this places them in a situation with representatives of the RIAA and MPAA, namely all those people that got sued for using Kazaa probably were using AOL as their ISP.

* AOL has crossed the great expanse of just being an American company, it's branched into other countries and in certain respects could be seen as a company that has to deal with rules and regulations set by it's parent nation.

* Bloated software. This use to be what the internet was about back in the day when you either had TELNET and commandline communications or Compuserver running a Sprynet browser. Simply such "Internal Intraneted" structures are outdated with the modern insurgance of the Open access internet. You could argue that "AOL protects it's customers from certain things" however you could also suggest that AOL is "Targetted by many antisocial archityped unappreciated underfunded consumers".

All the more reason to not use AOL. Do you really use it for anything else than web browsing? Their software is SUPER bloated, has little to no advanced features, and you are really not as safe as they claim they make their software. If you have broadband, you are already paying seperate for that, so why not just get a free e-mail address, AIM, and lose the AOL.


yeah i decided to do just that. i just had an email there for 8 years but i sent out change of address to my address book and uninstalled their software and im cancelling today :) thanks for the reply.