Adware vs. Spyware

While advertising\sponsoring is a common way to publish and promote a product for free, some software advertising systems do more then just showing static banners, they make use of your internet connection to retrieve new banner ads from a third parties server and send various information about you. This information is collected and sold to third parties. (In short words: The more they know about you, the higher is your value for them.) Because of the unobviously, secretly behavior of these systems, they are also called advertising trojans. Most of these systems are installed with a (often popular) host application, which may or may not work without the snoop ware components installed. Some attach them self to your browser, some are completely invisible. Popular applications including parasites are, for example Go!Zilla, AudioGalaxy or BearShare.