Long considered to be malware and a threat to privacy and security, keylogging software has been found on Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome. However, these keyloggers were not placed there by hackers—the companies put them there on purpose.

Google and Microsoft added keyloggers to their browsers in an attempt to improve searches for their users. Keylogging allows the browser to determine common or most likely searches based on the user’s past usage. They also store user log-ins and passwords for the user’s convenience, track activity to help determine the cause of errors, and employers use keyloggers to track employee productivity. While this is all very useful for the companies doing the tracking, it makes anti-malware protection more complicated, because the malware applications like Kaspersky AntiVirus cannot simply delete all keyloggers as they have up until this point.

Cyber criminals use keylogging to capture and record each keystroke you make to steal personal information like user IDs, passwords and anything else they can use to steal your identity. However, some companies are now using keylogging for more legitimate purposes.

In order to determine the best course of action regarding keyloggers, Kaspersky Labs, an industry leader in anti-malware protection, is seeking legal counsel. While they do not want to accuse legitimate companies of wrongdoing, they still want to provide the best and most comprehensive anti-malware protection on the market. If it were up to Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the company, users would not stand for these privacy-invading programs to be present on their browsers and request the companies to remove them. “That would save us a lot of work, and we already have plenty to do,” he told Computer Weekly. Google is already reacting to the public’s aversion to keylogging by promising to keep the information anonymous, but Microsoft has made no such announcements as of yet.

What it all comes down to is this: is the convenience provided by keylogging worth compromising the security of your computer?