Bonzi Buddy

BonziBuddy was a popular desktop virtual assistant from the early 2000s. While famously marketed as a friendly, purple, talking gorilla that told jokes and sang songs, it was actually a notorious piece of adware/spyware that collected user data and bombarded computers with deceptive pop-up ads.How It WorkedFeatures: Residing on your Windows desktop, BonziBuddy acted as an interactive "internet friend". It used text-to-speech to read emails, tell jokes, share trivia, and perform web searches.The Catch: As users interacted with it, the software secretly monitored browsing habits, hijacked browsers to change homepages and default search engines, and generated intrusive, fake "Windows error" pop-up ads to trick users into buying other products.