Animated backgrounds are a fun way to liven up personal web pages, emails or Myspace pages. Animated gifs and background designs are so fun to work with, and best part about them is they are free. There are thousands of free animation websites available these days, you can find virtually any object in any color you wish, animated and ready to put on your animated background, if you can afford the time to find it.

Animated gifs and animated backgrounds can be lots of fun to download and create dazzling web pages with, but beware! If you aren’t careful about where you’re getting your free animated backgrounds from, you could be downloading a lot more than just free animations - you could end up with a horrible surprise instead!

When you’re downloading animated backgrounds, emoticons, free smileys or gif icons from one of the hundreds of free resources on the internet, it seems harmless enough, but many places imbed malicious spyware or malware into the items you are downloading from their site.

A good friend of mine was looking for animated smileys for her emails and went to Smiley Central to find them. She saw a free animation program offered and decided to download it. That was a huge mistake! It instantly infected her computer with spyware that practically crippled her computer. She didn’t know she had been snipped by malicious spyware bandit at the time, and it took her several weeks to figure out why her computer was crashing, running slowly, and taking forever to load.

The free clip art and gif sites do this because they know you are looking for free animated backgrounds, which means you have a specific interest in web design. They give you their products for free, then sell your information to spammers who attempt to sell you something. They install spyware on your computer that tells them where you go on the Internet and what your browsing habits are. This information is valuable to a lot of people. They may also install malware, which can do damage to your machine, or pick up your passwords or credit card information.

So, if your really want to download free animations, be sure to update your spyware software before you visit the sites. If you have up to date computer security you should have no problem downloading all the free animated backgrounds, icons, smileys or Myspace animations you want. When you are done downloading, run your spyware program to make sure everything was caught. Some downloadable programs won’t run if you remove the spyware, but the choice is up to you. Do you want the free animated backgrounds, or do you want your privacy?