Vassar Technology Today | Facebook, Windows software integration compromise user privacy

Matthew Leung Managing Editor

Just last Wednesday, April 11, Facebook updated its layout and added a few new features. One such feature was the addition of Newsfeed preferences that allow the user to type up to 40 names of people they want to monitor more closely. The Newsfeed, located on the user’s homepage, will hone in on and report the activities of those people, such as relationship status changes, group information and fluctuation, wall communications, and the addition and removal of profile information. No doubt the balance between the user’s control of privacy and stalker-friendly features like the Newsfeed has been tilting towards the latter. This is not a surprise, since Facebook’s privacy-unfriendly, stalker-friendly progression is not a brand new trend in computing, but rather one that follows the path forged by the the privacy-challenged Windows operating system.

Windows, by design, was built in a way that makes it difficult for users to protect their own privacy. In 1995, Microsoft decided to integrate Internet Explorer (IE) into the second release of Windows 95 so that each copy of Windows comes with IE. This was not only a move to monopolize IE, as was pointed out by lawsuits such as the United States vs. Microsoft case in 1998, but also to compromise users’ privacy.

One intrinsic feature of IE is that it records a history of all the Web sites visited by the user. This is reasonable for many purposes, such as making it easier for users to find a Web site they previously visited. On the other hand, there is much less justification for keeping a record of the files that users access on their local hard drive.

But the integration of IE into Windows does just that. The interface and space for browsing local files is also the same as that for browsing Web sites, so Web site history and local file history are not distinguished but are recorded together. While only some of the file-access history is located in the Web history folder, the address bar in IE does store the path and names of local files the user has accessed.

The same integration happens in Facebook, resulting in the same compromise of the user’s privacy. Tradi-tionally, in online communities like MySpace, when a user posts a note, other users cannot find out about that post in a space that aggregates notes from many users, unless they click on a specific user’s profile to see if he or she has added any notes. This space is similar to the Web site history in a browser in that it only stores a record of notes posted by others.

Facebook, with Newsfeed, introduces an integrated space that contains not just a history of posted notes, but a combination of various other profile changes, updates, and user communications. It treats all user actions, not just posting notes, as if they were posts that need to be broadcasted for others’ immediate attention. If treating local file access history as if it were Web site access history is not bad enough, treating every little profile action the user makes as if they were note postings worthy of being broadcast should quality Newsfeed as a stalking tool.

The implication of Windows’ and Facebook’s integration is that the this space becomes the only way for the user to store Web site history or broadcast note postings. Since the user has no choice but to use that space, he or she must allow the recording of local file access history or other types of profile actions. Even though Facebook has a section just for notes and posted items, the lack of options for organizing and displaying the posts means that Newsfeed will win as the choice to broadcast one’s notes.

As with the Newsfeed, users harbor the illusion that their privacy is protected because they have options to disable the broadcasting of a few or all their actions, just as a user can delete IE history files. But the privacy options can only hide your actions from the newsfeed, not the actions of others towards you. If others add you as a friend or tag you in a note or photo, for example, the action with your name tagged can still show up in the Newsfeed depending on the originating user’s privacy setting, and you cannot control it using your own privacy options. In the case of Windows, there are so many places, not just the address bar, that store names of files accessed (such as the registry) that it is virtually impossible to delete all traces of local file access, let alone Web site history.

Facebook’s original advantage over networks like MySpace is that the user profile is closed to the public and that the user can choose exactly who sees what information. As for Windows, its original appeal to the business market was in the security and privacy options it offered for networking, which were desperately needed with the emergence of the Internet. But both have gone astray. As more features were added, both services made key moves, such as the integration of IE and the introduction of newsfeed, that shattered their innocent commitment to user security and privacy.