The perils of desktop tracking

One of the first things most of us learn about computers is that they are not particularly smart; they only do the things that they have been told to do. Sometimes telling a computer to do something can be a long and repetitive process, bringing into question the benefits of the whole exercise. As developers work to improve the experience of using computers, they find themselves trying to enable those computers to make more educated guesses about what the user may want to do. The technology to make those guesses is improving, but it brings risks as well as benefits. How much do we really want our computers to know - and tell - about what we are doing?

The Zeitgeist project aims to make desktop systems more helpful by keeping close track of what the user has been doing. Its developers describe it this way:

Zeitgeist is ostensibly independent of any specific desktop, but it seems to be driven more from the GNOME side of the house than any other. The fact that it has recently been entirely rewritten in the Vala language and proposed as an official GNOME module tend to reinforce that impression. Canonical has been putting in some of the development effort and Unity makes use of Zeitgeist. Tools like the GNOME Activity Journal also obtain information from Zeitgeist.

The Zeitgeist use cases page makes it clear that the plan is to create a comprehensive mechanism for the tracking, analysis, and sharing of user activity. Some examples include:

Undoubtedly there are a lot of useful things that can be done with this kind of tracking data. But there is also a possible down side; what happens if a detailed log of a user's activities gets into the wrong hands? The Zeitgeist "about" page has a rather unsatisfactory response to this concern: don't run untrusted applications on your system. Certainly that is good advice, but it also misses part of the point.

One can easily imagine an untrusting employer routinely examining the activity logs on all of its computers; it would be a shame, after all, if an employee were to be doing something unproductive on the job. This kind of information would be even more useful to governments that, for good reasons or bad, seek to know what somebody has been up to. The activity log could be a gold mine for inquisitive spouses, concerned parents, or curious roommates. This log could also open up a victim's life to any sort of successful malware attack. The advice to avoid running untrusted applications really only addresses the last of those concerns, and it is a partial response at best.

A somewhat improved response can be seen in this post from Zeitgeist developer Seif Lotfy. He has been working on the Vala port of the "activity log manager" (ALM), a tool for controlling the information tracked by Zeitgeist. Using ALM, it is possible to configure the system to forget events after a specific period of time - or to disable logging entirely. It is also possible to turn off logging involving specific types of files (videos or email messages, say), directories, or applications. After a proper bit of configuration, one's boss can see that flurry of spreadsheet activity but will remain unaware of all the time spent in a web browser.

This kind of configurability is a step in the right direction, but it is still a partial response at best. There will undoubtedly be legions of users who are unaware that this logging is happening at all; they are unlikely to find the utility to fine-tune that logging. Even users who want the functionality provided by this logging may find themselves reconsidering after their activity is exposed to the wrong person.

For a certain class of user, the answer will be to simply turn off features like Zeitgeist altogether - once they become aware of such features. But even the most paranoid among us find ourselves, at times, wishing that our computers were a little smarter in their interaction with us. Many (probably most) of us want the computer to understand how we work and to make that work easier and less repetitive. So, increasingly, those computers will observe what we do and build their own models of who we are and how we work. Progress toward the creation of those models appears to be outpacing the work to protect them; experience suggests that this problem will only be addressed after some people have learned about the issue the hard way.

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