🚀 go-pugleaf

Absolute trust in Zone Alarm is required by the user (that it will not 
transmit unauthorized data), I don't now have that trust so I 
uninstalled it (using the custom option to get rid of everything listed) 
a few days after I installed it.

Why ?  I have concerns about privacy on the internet and potential 
invasion of privacy by cookies (especially from an advertising company 
that now owns a mail order database), by advertising supported software, 
and the fact that Zone Labs is giving away for free an apparently 
excellent fully functional program that does not appear to be time 
limited. They may of course be innocently testing and debugging it 
before making a paid version available in stores and/or by e-commerce, 
but they could also be laying the groundwork for a future invasion of 
privacy on a grand scale. Who knows what this firewall program is or 
will be doing behind the scenes.

There are too many things that don't add up so I don't want to take a 
chance on it. For whatever it is worth, here is what I know for sure:

I checked some of the Windows Registry entries it made and was surprised 
to find that in

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\Registration]

the user information was in encrypted format. I do not know of any other 
programs that do this.  What, I wondered are these guys hiding.  Why is 
the user denied knowledge of what registry information is kept about him 
or her.  This is my registry, not theirs.

The full list of entries for this registry key is (encrypted data has 
been removed, I replaced it with ="" ):

"Address1"=""
"Address2"=""
"City"=""
"Country"=""
"EMailAddr"=""
"Phone"=""
"PostalCode"=""
"RegisteredOrganization""
"RegisteredOwner"=""
"State"=""
"WantEmail"=""
"WantPost"=""
"SurveyComputers"=""
"SurveyNetConn"=""
"SurveyPeople"=""
"SurveyUse"=""

Why, I wondered, are there any entries for

"SurveyComputers"=""
"SurveyNetConn"=""
"SurveyPeople"=""
"SurveyUse"=""

If you are running Zone Alarm and wish to check your own registry click 
the Windows Start button, click Run, and type the word REGEDIT in the 
open dialog box and click OK (but don't change anything in the registry 
unless you know what you are doing).  Compare this with similar entries 
for other installed programs under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software key.

I then checked the jobs on their website at 

http://www.zonelabs.com/jobs.htm 

and for the Director of Strategic Business Systems it says:
"We are seeking a bright individual to be the heart of Strategic 
Business Systems; responsibilities will be to architect and implement 
the backbone of Zone Labs automated revenue accounting systems and e-
commerce model. Play a lead role in creating marketing information 
systems that will allow us to target and market directly to our customer 
base using personalization software on our site, crafting direct 
electronic campaigns as well as collecting and consolidating our 
customer statistics (data mining). .........."

Phrases like "target and market directly to our customer base" and "data 
mining" in conjunction with encrypted registry entries containing user 
data makes me very nervous. Does this mean Zone Alarm is potentially an 
even more dangerous threat to privacy than advertising supported 
software. Being a program it can access any Registry Information (ANY, 
not just the keys referred to above) or any Disk File that it chooses 
to. 

I restarted in DOS mode and checked what files were left behind:

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\INTERN~1 ("Internet Logs" the Zone 
Labs\TrueVector\LocalStoreDir)

.              <DIR>        03-17-00  3:19a
..             <DIR>        03-17-00  3:19a
IAMDB    RDB        37,376  03-17-00  7:22p
OEMCOM~1 LDB        22,016  03-17-00  7:22p
         2 file(s)         59,392 bytes

According to 

http://www.zonelabs.com/zonealarm/za_faq_details.htm

The IAMDB.RDB file contains all the Internet access restrictions for 
your computer. This includes: rules, their settings, and objects that 
the rules apply to: programs, users, computers, subnets, zones, etc. 

The <mycomputer>.LDB file is the Internet log database for your 
computer. They say the only thing that is stored in the logs for 
ZoneAlarm is your computer's name and IP address, and icon bitmaps for 
your programs. However if their IAM experimental software is (later ?) 
installed it enables the maximum logging capability of the engine, 
including: programs that have used the Internet, users that ran them, 
protocols they've used, sites they've connected to, and every other 
piece of information you see in the IAM log and alert windows.  This 
leaves a lot of unanswered questions such as: under what circumstances 
is the IAM experimental software installed, is the user informed at the 
time, do they consent to the collection of this data, why is it being 
collected, etc. Can it ever be read or uploaded through an internet 
connection (with or without your knowledge).  Lots of potential for 
invasion of privacy there.

The above is user data that is of no use with the program gone, it 
should have been presented in the uninstall as an optional delete.  It 
wasn't, so I manually deleted the contents of this directory and removed 
the directory. Also remaining was:

Directory of C:\PROGRA~1\ZONELA~1\ZONEAL~1

.              <DIR>        03-17-00  2:57a
..             <DIR>        03-17-00  2:57a
ZONEBAND DLL        76,560  02-16-00  7:41p
         1 file(s)         76,560 bytes

The above is likely the item on the tool bar. I manually deleted the 
contents of this directory and removed the directories ZONELA~1\ZONEAL~1

Then I restarted Windows and checked the Registry again and found Zone 
Labs keys still existed with the encrypted user data intact so I 
manually deleted keys 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Zone Labs] and 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Zone Labs]   

These keys should have been removed in the uninstall, I am not 100% 
certain they were not as I had REGEDIT running at the time the uninstall 
was running (started before uninstall) and I did not close it until 
after uninstall finished so REGEDIT may have rewritten deleted data.  
Perhaps somebody else can test after an uninstall when REGEDIT is not 
running.

On checking from the file list in

http://www.zonelabs.com/zonealarm/za_faq_uninstall.htm

I also noticed that the c:\windows\system\vsutil.dll was not removed by 
the uninstall.  This .dll seems to handle the on line registration for 
Zone Alarm.

Christopher Anthistle