Printer company accused of installing software that tracks usage

Allegations have been swirling around an online newsgroup this week that printer manufacturer Lexmark has been installing spyware on its customers' computers.

Reports on the comp.periphs.printers Usenet newsgroup claim that Lexmark has been planting spyware on its customers' PCs in the form of undocumented software that monitors the use of its printers and silently reports back to a Lexmark-owned company website.

One user said that after initially denying the allegations, Lexmark acknowledged installing tracking software that reported printer and cartridge use back to the company for survey purposes. He claimed that Lexmark said no personal data was taken by the program, and that it was impossible to identify anyone by it.

However, users installing the software are prompted to fill in a registration form including their name and the serial number of the product.

The newsgroup posting claims that the program, found on the X5250 installation software, embeds itself in the registry and monitors the use of the printer through DLL files in the c:\program_files\lexmark500 folder.

The program sends the information, which includes print and scanning data, to the URL www.lxkcc1.com. According to the internet Whois database, this domain name belongs to Lexmark International in Kentucky.

Lexmark's UK office has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

This is why I use ZoneAlarm firewall and set it to the highest settings so that everytime a program wants to access the internet, I have to say "OK." It's annoying for most other people, but I enjoy the security.

How safe is the Windoz XP firewall? Is there a way to beef it up?

I use FireFox........can you beef up the settings on that?

There was a security settting for IE6 to beef up browser surfing?

thanks

XP firewall helps, but isn't as robust as ZA or blackIce. The default XP Firewall settings are supposed to warn you when a program accesses the internet, but it doesn't always do that. I'm not sure if it would have helped in this situation because I never use XP Firewall (It is not good to have two firewalls running at once).

Firefox about the only thing you can do make it more secure is make it ask you when to store cookies. But that has nothing to do with this issue.