Dear all, Having just come across this thread by chance, we would like to clarify a fundamental misunderstanding with regard to the Digital Future Community and the associated browser add-on: The Digital Future Community is a market research programme conducted by us, nurago, an online market research company located in Germany and part of the GfK group. We developed the Gacela software which you seem to have installed on your PC. Obviously, you or somebody else who is using the same computer, has voluntarily downloaded and installed the Gacela add-on onto your PC to become a participant in our research. Either you or another person in your household is registered as a member with an online market research panel in the United States and accepted an invitation to take part in the Digital Future Community against payment or other compensation, e.g., panel-credits. Gacela serves to research the usage of certain online offers. It records which websites you visit while you are using the internet and which advertisements are displayed. The Gacela add-on is automatically activated each time the browser is opened. As a part of the research programme, you may also occasionally be asked to complete short questionnaires. For this purpose, notifications are displayed in the browser window. Gacela is not malware. It is whitelisted by several major anti-virus software vendors and never installs onto any computer without the user's knowledge and explicit consent. In exceptional cases we have found that some anti-virus packages will flag our software as a trojan. We can assure you that this is not the case, however, if this happens, please take comfort in the fact that your anti-virus software is clearly working exceptionally well. As a member of international and domestic market research organizations, such as ESOMAR and BVM, nurago is committed to the industry's professional rules of conduct, strictest compliance with data-protection laws and a policy of maximum transparency towards research-participants. Your privacy is very important to us. In particular, nurago as a market research company has no intention to use collected personal information for any marketing purposes whatsoever or to reveal collected data to any third party, including clients, unless in an aggregated statistical form. For further details, including instructions for uninstalling, please refer to our support-website: http://dfc.gacela.eu/index.html and our privacy disclosure agreement: http://service-dfc.gacela.eu/gacela2/gacela2_dfc/file.php?file_id=html.nurago_policy_2010 If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us: gacela-support [at] nurago.com However, we apologize for any confusion. Kind regards, Bernd Schaefer Manager Panel Support nurago GmbH