"SimCity 4 is attempting to monitor user activities on this computer"

[Poetic 0]

Just now I was playing a city and decided to exit to region mode. The game froze the entire computer and at first I was worried that it could be a mod (I just got done downloading a bunch of them - including the rural highway - which I may say is GREAT), but when I was able to get back to my windows desktop (SC4 still running), I found out the freezing was most likely due to Zone Alarm, which gave the following error:

"Sim City 4 is attempting to monitor user activities on this computer. If allowed it may try to track or log keystrokes (user input), mouse movements/clicks, web sites visited, and other user behaviors"

This is the first time I've been given this warning by ZA. Why would SC4 need to monitor my activities? The paranoid part of me began to think of possible reasons and came up with a deadly scenario - what if some bat or mod creator added a trojan to one of their creations to log in user keystrokes? Anyway, I'm sure (at least hope) that isn't it, but I still can't help but wonder why I got this error

Anyone else get it? Know what it means? Etc...

Also, I denied it access. Game continued running normally, so it must not have been a vital operation.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Make sure you have the latest updates to Zone Alarm, then go look at its control lists and make sure Simcity4.exe is in the permitted stuff list.  This game doesn't do any such stuff, but there may be some code in there that ZA doesn't like.  It does do a little multi-tasking.