HLS Launches Anti-Spyware

For frustrated students everywhere waiting for that all-important Facebook message to load, the University is offering a helping hand. Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has joined with a group at Oxford University to launch StopBadware.org, a site that aims to eliminate spyware and other performance-inhibiting programs.

“Badware,” according to the website, is a broad category that encompasses adware, spyware, and other malicious programs. The site will collect individuals’ stories of their battles with the electronic nemesis.

“We hope this will be a neighborhood watch of badware,” said Executive Director of the Berkman Center John G. Palfrey, Jr., who is co-directing the project. “Based on what we hear, we’re going to design programs to combat the problem.”

Almost sixty million American adults have spyware on their computers, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

For Palfrey, the problem is more than a nuisance; he said badware raises issues of corporate responsibility and trust. Many companies that put on legitimate faces to the public are, in fact, bundling badware with their services because they know they can get away with it, he said.

“There’s no reason why you should be less accountable on the Internet than in real space,” Palfrey said.

“We’re going to name names,” he added, referring to the policy of the group to list on their website companies that use badware.

Palfrey is also concerned that badware is making the public anxious and distrustful of technology because many people are confused about what is happening to their computers.

“You don’t know what’s running, you don’t know how to get rid of it, it’s confusing,” he said. As a result, “people are trusting the Internet much less than before.”

With the group’s debut, Harvard will be fighting badware both in and out of the Yard.

“We see spyware quite a bit,” said Erin Nettifee, the supervisor of Residential Computing for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Students begin to notice that their computers are slower, but don’t do anything about it. Eventually, the problem snowballs and they bring their computer in to us,” she said.

Nettifee said that Computer Services recommends several steps Harvard students should take to protect themselves, including installing anti-virus software, password protecting all accounts, and keeping software up-to-date on their computers.

Eighty-seven percent of Harvard undergraduates reported using anti-virus software, according to the FAS Computer Survey from 2003, the last year for which numbers are available.

Nettifee said she did not have any specific numbers for increasing incidents of spyware problems at Harvard. But she noted that “in the last four or five years, the problem has definitely gotten worse.”

Palfrey sees projects like StopBadware—which gives power to individual citizens rather than formal government groups—as the future of maintaining law and order on the Web. He said legislation monitoring the Internet is rare.

“And even when you have a law, it’s hard to enforce because of cross-border problems.” Palfrey added.

—Staff writer Jillian M. Bunting can be reached at jbunting@fas.harvard.edu.