One of the principal retailers in the United States—Sears Holding Corporation, owner of Sears, Kmart, and Roebuck and Co.—has agreed on a settlement with federal authorities in regards to charges that it inserted privacy-thieving programs created by ComScore onto its clients' computers.

Sears has also agreed to purge all the private data it has pilfered through its ComScore spyware. Its database is mostly composed of its customers' personal web surfing routines, preferences, and habits. Also, the retailing giant has been ordered by the court to be more forthright about any consumer-related information it may gather in the future.

The retailing company may have not admitted to violating any laws, but its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a clear-cut victory for privacy and anti-spyware advocates everywhere.

As documented extensively by the online community in 2008, Sears had delivered e-mails to its consumer base shortly after they surrendered their e-mail addresses at Sears.com. The messages contained invitations for them to join an "exciting online community" that turned out to be a sales pitch to install snooping software into their computers made by ComScore, a web research firm.

The software allegedly monitored the customers' every Internet surfing move, and it rightfully alarmed a lot of people within the worldwide web—so much so that the whole incident compelled the FTC to file a complaint to a court of law. In fact, according to the FTC's lawsuit, the information that Sears procured with the snoopware was so comprehensive it bordered to the point of being stalker-like.

Their databases included information about the sites consumers browsed, the links that they visited, the text of protected pages they frequented such as library borrowing histories, online drug prescription records, Internet banking statements, rental transactions, and select header fields that could display the sender, subject, recipient, and size of their web-mail messages. The application also made real-time records of offline activities taking place on those customer PCs as well.

What's more, the methodical and thorough ComScore spyware even goes as far as observing specific keystrokes and mouse movement habits in order to differentiate the people using same monitored PC. Needless to say, privacy advocates and the FTC were up-in-arms as soon as the above information about the voyeuristic program came to light.

Ben Edelmen, a professor at Harvard University who regularly critiques spyware companies, believes that the FTC settlement was a great victory against spyware abuse. He also gave due credit to Sears for confessing to the digital travesty, even though he'd prefer the company to not attempt the stunt in the first place.