Watch out, downloaders. Utilities like RealDownload, Netscape/AOL Smart Download, and NetZip Download Demon utilities may be secretly transmitting your details whenever you download a file. Be warned… Security experts warn that every time you use one of these utilities to download a file from the Internet, the complete URL of the file, along with you computer’s individual Internet IP address, and a unique ID tage that has been assigned to your machine, is immediately and secretly transmitted to the program’s publisher. This allows a database of your entire, personal, file download history to be assembled and uniquely associated with your individual computer.Real Networks deny tracking file downloads with their version of NetZip, and have threatened legal action against at least one of the people making the claims. Meanwhile, New York class action attorneys  seem to confirm the story, accusing Netscape of eavesdropping on consumers who download software through its network. They too say that Netscape’s SmartDownload software illegally monitors downloads of ‘.exe’ and ‘.zip’ files, capturing and transmitting back to Netscape uniquely identifiable information when a person downloads software. This action, the suit claims, permits Netscape to create a profile of a customer’s downloads. ‘Unbeknownst to the members of the Class, and without their authorization,’ the suit says, ‘defendants have been spying on their Internet activities.’ RealDownload, which descends from the same software as SmartDownload, is said to be tagging downloads in a very similar fashion, monitoring downloads and reporting back to base every time a file is downloaded. When finstalling each of the downloading utilities, machines are silently ‘tagged’ with a unique and persistent ID that is sent - along with the machine’s Internet IP address - whenever any file is downloaded, from anywhere on the Internet. ‘This unique tagging can have only one purpose,’ says Steve Gibson of the Gibson Research Corporation, one of the groups making claims against Real Networks. ‘The aim is to uniquely identify us and our computer to the program’s publisher for the purpose of tracking us, and assembling a profile of our activities. When you consider that each user is uniquely identified, and that every one of their subsequent Internet downloads is then reported back to the download product’s publisher along with their unique ID tag and their machine’s unique Internet IP address . . . it is not difficult to wonder why this information is being collected, and to what ends the data is being put.‘More detailed Real Networks bashin’: grc.com