Too much panic about spyware?
If a program records your key strokes and sends the log to a anonymous server for people to hack into your accounts: it is spyware. If some marketing company looks at the URLs you surf and pops up advertising related to that from the background: it is spyware.
But what about the alexa or the google toolbar?
I mean the SPY in spyware tells us what to think: a spy is a SECRET agent, nobody knows of. So, does a hint before the stuff is installed make it non-spyware? Yes! It makes it AdWare! Not less annoying most of the time, but from the definition not real spyware anymore!
Toolbars like the above are very useful tools, but they do for sure gather information about your behaviour. Yesterday someone asked me, if that is not dangerous software and that he does not want to be spied on!
Well, the more features you want to use of Popup-Blockers, Toolbars and simliar stuff, the more likely are you sending out information about yourself to the world.
Maybe the best is to just take the big names, so at least you got somebody to sue if data leaks out! 
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