In May of 2000, the parent of a child who was using a piece of educational software called Reader Rabbit was alerted by their firewall.

Another piece of software that notes happenings in one's computer, especially when those happenings involve the computer making connections to the internet.

They were alerted that this Reader Rabbit game was calling home,

was making a surreptitious internet connection behind the scenes,

and sending data back to its parent company, Mattel.

Alarmingly, he was informed of this connection by the firewall later

after his kid was asleep when he was doing work on the same computer. The Reader Rabbit software

had apparently logged data about its use and was now, while he was connected to the internet,

sending that data elsewhere, heavily encrypted, so he had no way of knowing what sorts of data

it was transmitting, about what, and to whom.

When asked about this phone-home behavior, a Mattel spokesperson said that nothing nefarious was

happening. The company had software called Broadcast, enabled in something like 100 CD-ROM-based

products they sold, installed automatically

with the rest of the program, and it was included primarily as a means of offering discounts

on other products to folks who had already bought one of Mattel's software offerings, or in some

cases to offer users a freebie, like a screensaver, after the

software confirmed they had installed the original product. Not mentioned in Mattel's press

release about the issue, though, is the fact that many companies, including this kind of marketing

and advertising-related software with their products,

also collect a bundle of other data from their users' computers,

including very personal bits of private data that could, in the wrong hands,

lead to some serious security concerns.

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