One of the more controversial developments online is so-called spy software - also known as Internet monitoring - which is used in unusual ways by families. Some spouses, afraid of cyber romances by their partners, are spying on them. And some parents are spying on their kids to keep track of where they go online.

There are basically two kinds of such software. One serves as a kind of VCR, "recording" all the activity on a particular computer - including websites visited, e-mail sent, instant messages, etc. You can come home and then "playback" what happened. You can set how often the recording should happen - say, every 30 seconds, or a much shorter time frame. To review the recording, you need to be at that machine.

The other kind allows you do a one-time install on a machine and then have reports e-mailed to you wherever you are. So basically, you can keep track of what your kids are doing wherever you are in the world, e-mailing you reports of what's going on.

To test it out, I installed SpectorSoft's eBlaster on my office PC and had it e-mail me reports of where all I'd been and what I'd done each day. Got to tell you: it's easy to see something incriminating or suspect in just routine usage. In any case, a note to my wife: If you do ever see anything you don't like, it was "research."

A feature of such products is that you can hide them in stealth mode, so that no one knows they have been installed on the machine. In fact, I know of people who, when they wanted to install stealth software on a machine, discovered that their spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend has already installed it to spy on them.

Kasey Sellati of SpectorSoft gives these examples of how the software can be used:

Tell eBlaster the email address to send these reports to -- for example, the email address you use at work if you want to be able to see what your daughter does when she comes home from school and you are still at work.

Now, when your daughter gets home from school, every time she gets an email, you'll IMMEDIATELY get a copy of it and every time she sends an email you'll immediately get a copy of it sent to you.

Plus, once an hour, you'll get a copy of her chat room conversations, instant messages, web sites visited and keystrokes typed (including passwords).

If you want to try out these products, you should visit SpectorSoft.com and check out eBlaster (which does the e-mail reports) or Spector Pro (which does the kind of recording I described above). They retail for $99.95 each (a Mac version of an earlier edition of Spector is $69.95).

Companies, too, are now using such software to spy on their employees. So you should be aware of this.

SpectorSoft includes the following warning on its site, but you can be sure there are folks out there who don't heed it:

Spectorsoft WILL COOPERATE FULLY with law enforcement authorities if you try to install this software on a computer that you do not own or do not have permission to install to.

There are several companies involved in this category. For a list of them, see this Google directory entry. And see my story on chatroom monitoring.

Write to techguru@sree.net and let me know your thoughts.