Yahoo! gets tooled-up to fight spyware

Yahoo! is expected to release on Thursday an upgrade for its downloadable toolbar to help people detect and remove spyware, or malicious files, on their PCs.

For now, the web portal is testing the technology, which has been supplied by anti-spyware company PestPatrol. It will offer the toolbar upgrade only to a select number of people at "Beta.toolbar.yahoo.com", Yahoo spokeswoman Stephanie Iwamasa said. It can be used to perform a high-level scan of files on the PC to detect viruses or other applications that were installed surreptitiously and are used to spy on computer behaviour, or spyware.

"The toolbar is the best place to present this application because of its accessibility - you can log on and use your toolbar from any machine - and because it's a persistent application in the browser window," she said.

Yahoo! joins others in a fight against a mounting assault from spyware makers. Interest is even growing at the state and federal government levels in regulating and perhaps even banning adware and spyware. Utah has already enacted such a law, and the US House of Representatives and the Federal Trade Commission have convened hearings on the issue in the past few weeks.

EarthLink recently introduced anti-spyware technology for its subscribers. And last week, Google urged software makers to follow common-sense guidelines when writing programs that embed themselves on internet users' PCs. It said the programs should be clearly labelled, permit consumers to disable them and not do sneaky things like leak personal information.

Stefanie Olsen writes for CNET News.com