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SAN FRANCISCO - The heavily distributed kid-monitoring software ComputerCop, which many police departments around the US gave to families for free, is doing far more harm than good, a new report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges.

An eight-month investigation by the group -- a nonprofit that focuses on civil liberties in the digital realm -- says ComputerCop, which allows parents and guardians of children to monitor a child's computer and Internet use, is sketchy in its effectiveness and falls short on protecting user data from spying. The EFF report also alleges that ComputerCop engages in shady business practices to convince law enforcement officials to spend taxpayer money on the software.

"Probably the biggest problem of all is that there are law enforcement agencies that aren't actually paying attention to cybersecurity," said Dave Maass, who wrote the EFF report. "Some of the biggest jurisdictions in the country are giving out software that makes kids less safe if they use it."

ComputerCop, the eponymous company behind the software, did not respond to a request for comment.

The software, which works on both Windows and Mac, has two primary features. One is a search feature that lets the user review videos and images downloaded to the computer, as well as search documents on the hard drive for "thousands of keywords related to drugs, sex, gangs and hate groups."

The EFF report deems this feature "unreliable" and explains that some computers returned a "giant haystack" of false positives, while other computers returned better results from their built-in file-search function. An ancillary function of ComputerCop is to let parents see which websites their children have visited, but that's only if the child is using the Internet Explorer browser on Windows or Safari on a Mac. While it's true that a huge number of computers are sold with IE and Safari set as their primary browsers, it's easy enough to download and use an alternative, like Chrome or Firefox.

The second main feature of ComputerCop is a keylogger called KeyAlert. Keyloggers record all keystrokes made on a computer keyboard, including credit card information and username and password combinations. KeyAlert's logs are stored unencrypted on Windows computers, and on Macs they can be decrypted with the software's default password. The software can also be configured so that trigger words email an alert to the computer's owner.

KeyAlert must be installed separately from the rest of the ComputerCop software, but not all versions of ComputerCop have been distributed with it. There's no way to configure KeyAlert for a particular user, so it's possible to use it against anybody using the computer -- not just kids.

"When that happens, the software transmits the key logs, unencrypted, to a third-party server, which then sends the email," the EFF report said.

If the logs are being emailed unencrypted, as alleged, then they could be read with relative ease, according to the report, which also included instructions for removing ComputerCop.

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Report: ComputerCop Doing Far More Harm Than Good