Napster parasites: Leeching onto your personal info

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Author: JT Smith

From Salon.com: “Hard-drive snooping is the latest in
online grass-roots marketing, and Napster is helping to make it
happen. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks in which Net-connected
individuals make the contents of their hard drives available to the
general public are no longer being used just by music fans to swap
illicit MP3s; they are also increasingly being used as a savvy
promotional tool and a market research database by record labels,
musicians and entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out better,
faster ways to sell music. In fact, a whole new crop of market
research companies is springing up online — call them Napster
parasites or, more politely, symbionts — eager to take advantage
of the wealth of personal data that can be mined from hard drives
all over the world.”