Yahoo Invisible Scanner hi5 | Yahoo Scanner hi5

Invisible scanners are scripts that are made to run either on the internet or as standalone programs on your pc that prevent people on your mailing list from keeping themselves hidden or invisible while logged in to yahoo and some other chat programs.

Invisible scanners are authored by various programmers and some scripts are available on the internet should you wish to install your own invisible scanner on your pc. While it is certainly convenient for you to be able to see if the people you need to talk to are online, the ethical issues regarding the breach on the individual’s right to privacy have yet to be addressed. This brings us back to the issue of privacy on the internet. Remember, it is generally the hackers who use spying on other people to make a living.

The first invisible scanner programs were created in the war-torn region of the middle east. The programs were probably offshoots of the paranoia for invisible surveillance. However, the parallelism between the two is lop-sided. Surveillance as it is conducted in guerilla warfare will not be done by people whose identities are known to you, or at least whose internet credentials you are partially aware of, such as the email address. Invisible scanners treats the friends and acquaintances on your mailing list as if they were all potential enemies poised to do you some personal harm in some way.

Criminals lose their right to privacy by reason of their felonies and because it is in society’s interest that their whereabouts and activities should be apparent. But the people on your mailing list are not usually felons or terrorists…that is, unless you yourself are one. The invisible scanner programs are therefore a violation in some way of a law-abiding person’s right not to be seen when he logs in to a chat program. People want to be unavailable not necessarily because they need to avoid confrontation. Some people just don’t want to be bothered while they are logged in. They may have some pressing deadlines to meet, article submissions that are going to be due, business presentations to complete or they may just have a migraine, or some particularly pesky friends whom they don’t want to insult by removing them from the list of contacts.

Being invisible on the chat doesn’t mean the person wants to avoid anyone. There are better ways to do that. I myself would scrap the email by which everyone knows me and create a new one. Then I would remove everyone from my mailing list so that we never get together in a Yahoo messenger session. That is the reason why these invisible scanners are really just useless programs. And more than useless, invisible scanners are bothersome to people who want some privacy on the internet for a while.

Thirdly, because invisible scanners have to use some kind of surveillance robot program to identify whether users are logged in, you are actually encouraging the use of these potentially harmful programs by using invisible scanners. There is the possibility that some of these “bots” may be hacker programs out to get the sensitive information on your computer. There will still be issues forthcoming concerning these invisible scanners, very probably. Meanwhile, it might not be a good idea to avail of that service on the net, or…worse…download and run the script on your own computer.

Tags: Invisible Scanner, Surveillance