Direct from Buzz Logic's FAQs:
Q. Who is BuzzLogic’s customer? How will they use it?
A. BuzzLogic’s first application is intended for marketers managing brands, reputations, products and customer relationships. One pressing need is among public relations practitioners, who will use BuzzLogic to monitor conversations that are taking place around a company, brand, products or competitors. With BuzzLogic, a
pr practitioner will quickly identify the most influential participants of a conversation.
She will have the ability to engage in order to set the record straight or perhaps amplify key points, and then follow, track and understand the impact of her action. Other marketing and research managers will use BuzzLogic to keep a finger on the pulse of markets, and to gain insight into the conversations that are forming around customer needs and wants. Customer service managers will use BuzzLogic to keep tabs on customer concerns, and nip potential problems in the bud. Public relations and marketing agencies will rely on BuzzLogic to help them develop and execute programs on behalf of their customers.
I did a search for Thumbnailer. This is what it does:
* Wizards to help you get up and running quickly
* JPG, GIF, MPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, TIFF, PCX, BMP, WBMP, PhotoCD, Photoshop, TGA, ASCII, WMF and EMF
* AVI, TTF (TrueType Fonts), animated GIF and multi-page TIFF frame extraction
* Support for reading RAW, NEF, FlashPix, video files and more via plug-ins.
* Batch or single file operation
* HTML page generator, with links, tables, HTML templates, and more.
* Output images in a wide choice of formats and color depths
* Apply contrast, sharpening, brightness corrections
* Copy EXIF and IPTC data from JPG files
* Overlay text and images (great for logos, watermarks, copyrights)
* Automatic background matte
* Multiple resizing methods (including DPI change, percent resize and more)
* Image edge fades
* Composite (contact sheet) creation
* Customizable input and output file name filters
* DOS command line operation. If you need quick and simple image processing in a DOS-only environment, check out SASuite.
* Image import and image processing plug-ins
* On-line help
* much much more.
Buzz Logic is snooping for any number of reasons one could imagine. Say, checking images for copyright infringement, locating images of a client's product or service to see how much play it's getting on the Web, or trying to determine the context in which a client's image is being used, etc.
It's an uninvited bot that collects info for public relations and marketing reasons. It's a personal decision whether to ban it or not. It is taking up bandwidth on a site you're paying for and you're getting nothing in return, which might be the most relevant factor here. I'm sure this type of snooping and info gathering will only increase as the Web matures. Just as we have "do not call" lists for tele-marketers, maybe someday we'll have "do not snoop" lists for bots.