New Alexa Algorithms - Toolbar Spyware

Alexa has changed the way they calculate the Alexa ranking system. They have always had a toolbar that came up as using spyware. I'm curious to see if their new algorithms have removed the spyware from the toolbar. I haven't tested it yet. Does anyone know if the Alexa toolbar still has spyware?

I like Alexa search because it is the second best page ranking engine behind Google's PageRank. I'd like to see them do well, with no spyware and with less bias with their toolbar users. The alexa rank for a site goes way up when users of the toolbar visit a site, a bit unfair for website webmasters who don't know this.

I guess that it is a matter of how you define spyware?

It is a tracking tool that measures the popularity of websites, so it has to "phone home" in order to work. The only issue would be exactly what it phones home? They claim not to collect any personally identifiable data but my concern would be that it might accidentally leak such information.

I also suspect that sort of software of being a potential source of conflicts, instability and slowing the system down.

There is a discussion here:

http://www.imilly.com/alexa.htm