Undergraduate Council Defeats FAS Network Privacy Bill

Curiosity killed the cat at last night's Undergraduate Council meeting, where a bill that proposed increasing network privacy was defeated by a large majority.

The Privacy of Computing Act requested that the Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services stop making "publicly available" user-locating functions such as finger, last and who.

The bill's co-sponsors, Rachel E. Barber '99 and Robert A. "Rocky" Fishman '99, said these functions compromise student privacy.

"We feel that certain aspects of the Unix environment...allow for a lot of private information to be seen by other users," Barber said.

Barber said the legislation was motivated by student sentiment.

"This is an issue that has come up in several campus publications over the last three and a half years...People are concerned to some extent," she said.

But Rick Osterberg '96, coordinator of residential computing support for FAS Computer Services, said features such as finger and who are popular among students.

"When finger is down, we get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of complaints," he said. "When there's problem with pine, nobody notices."

Osterberg said the bill would be ineffective because it did not propose specific solutions to the problem of privacy.

"The actual effect of the bill and the amendments is nothing," he said. "They ask us to do a whole lot of things we've already been doing for years and years and years."

Virginia J. Beauregard '01, president of the Harvard Computer Society, said it would be virtually impossible to remove the user-locating functions from the system anyway.

Osterberg agreed, saying, "You can't take the Unix out of Unix."

Council members sped the meeting along by voting on the bill rather than having a lengthy debate.

Other council business included reminding students of the "Town Meeting" about the construction of a student center on Thursday night at 2:30 p.m. in the ARCO Forum.

"We want the student center on the priority list submitted by the College for the next capital campaign," Council President Noah Z. Seton '00 said in his opening remarks.

Seton said the building would be a solution to the lack of performance and office space for student groups.

"All it would take to start solving those problems is one building," he said. "We start pushing for the building on Thursday night."