Thanks Darren Bolton for sending this into our way.
Right now, your boss, your spouse or the government could be secretly reading every word you type - even the ones you deleted - while surreptitiously taking your picture.
Sound alarming? The man who makes it possible is the first to agree.
"It"s horrifying!" said Richard Eaton, who develops, markets and even answers the technical help line for WinWhatWhere Corp. software.
"I"m Mr. Guard-My-Privacy, so it"s kind of ironic," said Eaton, a lanky 48-year-old with a diamond stud earring. "Every time I add a feature into it, usually it"s something that I"ve fought for a long time."
His qualms haven"t stopped him from selling the product, though - more than 200,000 copies of it, to everyone from suspicious spouses to the FBI.
And Eaton is building ever-more-detailed monitoring tricks into his Investigator software. The latest version, released this month, can snap pictures from a WebCam, save screen shots and read keystrokes in multiple languages.
Investigator already can read every e-mail, instant message and document you send and receive, even if you delete - or never even saved - what you typed.
The $99 downloadable program runs "hidden in plain sight." It changes names every so often, and files containing the information it gathers are given arbitrary old dates to make them difficult to find.
The monitor can choose to have a user"s every move sent to an e-mail address, or the program can be instructed to look for keywords like "boss," "pornography" or "terrorist" and only send records when it finds those prompts.