Oh please, just another example of the stupidity of people not paying attention and reading licenses and copyright data.
Opera may or may not contain spyware, that is the risk of closed source software, but the function the idiot in that article is describing is not spyware it is adware, and Opera are perfectly clear about this. Clicking on ads will customize what ads you receive, you can even tell them what ads you want to receive by filling in the advertising section of their preferences. They have a privacy policy telling you what they will do with personal data, and they tell you they are going to collect it. If the guy in the article did not know this he did not read the agreements properly, and if he did not read the agreements he is stupid.
This information is stored and dealt with by a libary, hence it looks at that DLL file occasionally. There is nothing covert about this, you agreed to this when you installed the damn program and didn't buy the browser but chose to use it for free.
