Could you face prison time for not cleaning your Spyware-infected PC?

We’ve seen the many cases of Spyware-makers being brought to justice and paying hefty fines because of their immoral practices and ill-gotten gains. (We hope to see more of these cases thanks to the work of the FTC, CDT, and Anti-Spyware Coalition)

We’ve seen cases of corporate espionage, like the Israeli couple who are serving time in prison for making spyware and charging companies for their services of spying and stealing data.

We’ve even seen cases of people who used Spyware with the intent of spying on their spouses getting thrown in jail. As was the case in the “Jealous Spyware Husband” who spent £100 on spyware to monitor his wife because he thought she was cheating on him and eventually killed her. He is now serving a life sentence.

But this is the first case I’ve seen where someone may receive prison time because of their negligence for not removing spyware from a PC… In Norwich, CT, a substitute teacher faces prison time because the classroom computer she was teaching with was infected with Spyware and she exposed her 7^th grade students to pornographic images due to the pop-ups that the Spyware was generating. Julie Amero was convicted on Friday, January 5, 2007 of four counts of risk of injury to a minor and faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison.

Is it not bad enough that spyware-makers are stealing our identity, capturing our data, annoying us with pop-ups, slowing down our Internet connection, and crashing our PCs? Now they are making their victims liable for the crap that they insidiously put on our computers!

(Source: McAfee avert labs.)

 

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