Yesterday's post addressed the negative impact of anti-circumvention legislation on security research.  There is another security issue that merits discussion – the involuntary installation of software that may constitute a personal security threat to individual computer users.  Such software is frequently classified as spyware – software programs that are placed on users' computers without their informed consent that proceed to cause havoc by compromising personal information, posing an identity theft risk, sending spam, and infecting other computers.

While spyware can worm its way onto a personal computer in many different ways, inclusion within a DRM is a possibility. The best-known example of the DRM-spyware connection is last year's Sony rootkit fiasco.