BearShare is now officially Beware Share!

In the interview on Zeropaid.com with Vinnie Falco, creator of Bearshare, he said that he was making income from "targeted advertising". I found this a bit suspicious as lately I’ve encountered a lot of software that collects information about web users without making itself obvious in order to establish a market demographic for advertising.

So I had a look at the Bearshare homepage and found the following information in the Bearshare privacy statement [http://www.bearshare.com/about.htm]:

“Bearshare.com does not store cookies or other information on your hard drive or in browser memory. BearShare.Net uses cookies as necessary to support the operations and features of the DC Forum software. Free Peers, Inc. does not collect any personal information about site visitors except for the country of origin for statistical reporting purposes. The BearShare installer and application do not collect, store, or send personal information about you or your computer anywhere, except as required by the Gnutella protocol for the operation of the software as stated in the User Documentation. This does not apply to third party software included with the BearShare distribution; See the privacy policies of the appropriate bundled software to find out more.”

Sounds pretty good so far except for the last couple of sentences so I downloaded the latest version of Bearshare to see what software is bundled with it. With either type of install there are 2 software components:

1) Bearshare
2) Onflow Rich Media Plugin

After installation there is no automatic way to deinstall the Onflow plugin. I went to the onflow site www.onflow.com and read their privacy policy for their player which contains the following:

“Player Privacy: The following information is specific to the Onflow Player, which allows users to enjoy rich multimedia displays through your browser. Data transmitted: Each time the Onflow Player displays images, it transmits data to our server such as the serial number of the Player, the image displayed, the web page in which it was shown and whether you moved your mouse over the image or clicked on it. This data does not identify you. However, it can convey data about the preferences of the person using that particular Player.”

So what does onflow do?
It’s an advertising banner player basically.

Quoted from their site: “The Flow for Web Viewers: Download the Onflow Player - a quick, one-time requirement that enables powerful, effects-filled animations in a Web browser. View a page containing an embedded Onflow ad. Experience unprecedented, broadcast-quality animation. Remember and act on the ad’s content, at rates far above static or slow-loading ads.”

As far as I can see, Spyware is a bit of a hot issue currently on the web. Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation is one well known person particulary opposed to this ( http://grc.com/optout.htm ) and there are a number of sites springing up around the web in opposition to user profiling and transmission of information for advertising or other purposes, even if it is anonymous. Major companies like Netscape, Real Media and Aureate have had a few issues due to this ( I think Real Media was the first one to have PR problems due to a similar strategy ). I would imagine that the Gnutella community would probably not be too enthusiastic about this either.

My only personal objection here is that there is no easily accessible information about what the player does unless you actually go to the Onflow site (not that I can find anyway ) and I don’t feel any great need to install something that’s going to show me advertising better : )

How to deinstall Onflow: I couldn’t find any way to do this automatically but after asking the Onflow support team I found that you can uninstall it conduct a find and replace of all files *onflow*.dll on your local hard drive and erase them. These files will include:

nponflow.dll
ieonflow.dll
onflowplayer0.dll
onflowplayer1.dll
and onflowreport.exe

So, if you’ve installed Bearshare and think you’d like to get rid of the Onflow player that should do it!

Vinnie, stop lying about Onflow, you might want to read 'The Cluetrain' instead.

The Kid -- "It's your right to question what is your right."

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