In this chapter a number of cases will be presented that involve violations of privacy.

Fingering Case

© 2007 by John Halleck, used with permission)

The case concerns a student who used a computer to monitor his ex-girlfriend by checking how often she logged on, from what terminal she logged on, and with whom she communicated. First, here is a bit of background on this case. Most computer systems have a “finger” command of some sort. This command tells if a given user is on the system or not, information about when that person was last on, and, often, information as to the location where the person logged in. The finger command on a system at a fictitious university that will be known as Desert State University also says whether the person has new mail (and when it was last read). Some finger commands even tell from whom the person last received mail. This “feature” would no doubt have been disabled on machines at the University in the years after this case was originally written. Most people at the University would agree that this information is more or less “public.”

Here is the substance of the case. Administrators discovered that one of their student machines was severely bogged down in a manner that made it painful for the average student to use. It was discovered that a particular student's script was eating up all the available resources of the machine. Contrary to stated policy, it was a background script that continued running twenty-four hours a day, whether or not the student who had written the script was logged on.