This will simply display banner images directly in the Opera interface. It will not harm your computer, and it will not collect personal information. It is not designed to track or record your computer use or internet visits. These images are banner ads showing e-commerce offers, news headlines, and other content. HTML, CSS, Java, scripting languages, and other such web content is disabled in the banner window.
Opera communicates with the ad service in order to be able to retrieve advertising content.
When you install Opera 5, your browser connects to a registration server and receives a unique identifying number. Without being able to set a unique ID to your browser, it would not have been possible to sell ads in Opera. When Opera is connected to the internet, the advertising content is occasionally refreshed by accessing an ad server which defines the content to be retrieved and written to Opera's cache on the hard disk of your computer. This communication is done in several steps. See ads.html for more details.