Honesty in Software

By Mark Gibbs on Fri, 07/07/06 - 11:50am.

I wonder if we’re going to see a new emphasis on corporate honesty in the software world over how users are viewed and treated by vendors.

It all really started with Sony last October. While the Sony rootkit debacle didn’t lead to anything like the kind of punishment that their management’s crimes warranted at least the large financial settlement and the public outrage raised awareness of what corporations shouldn’t try to hide.

Basically what was highlighted was that it doesn’t matter whether you are Joe Hacker from Poughkeepsie or Sony BMG from Germany/Japan /wherever, you can’t install software functionality on other people’s computers without telling them about it and if you get caught, you’re in trouble (although the degree of punishment appears to be inversely proportional to your organizational size – Joe Hacker, would go behind bars while Thomas Hesse, CEO of Sony BMG, gets nothing).

Then we had – and may still have more of – the < ahref=”http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2006/061206backspin.html”>Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notification stupidity – another Microsoft tactic in their never ending quest to own you and your PC. Microsoft have since backed down this program to the point where the WGAN software is to rarely call back to the mother ship but they haven’t abandoned the whole obnoxious plan either.

And now we find that Apple, Apple who is for the people, Apple who thinks different, has software functionality that no one knew about. Yep, Apple’s OS X Dashboard phones home to check that the Widgets installed under Dashboard are all valid programs.

Now Apple didn’t hide the fact that their software does this but they also didn’t make it optional either. Thus, if you are of a paranoid disposition, you might well find that the fact that you can’t opt out of the verification is at least worrying and at worst unacceptable.

Now you might consider that paranoia of this sort is over the top, that all of these people are just being ridiculous but it highlights a bigger issue: How much control we want to have over our computers. By way of analogy if you purchased a washing machine from Sears and they came by on a service call and added a video camera you would be, quite rightly, outraged.

So, Sony was completely wrong in how they tried to protect their rights and how they handled their end users and Microsoft was typically arrogant in how they did similar things and Apple was (let’s be kind) naïve.

The lesson that all software vendors should take away is don’t do anything underhand, be completely honest about the extent of functionality, and always let users opt out of any relationship you might want to have with them whether it’s a newsletter, product bulletins, security checks, or product validation.

In the near future the consequences of vendors that transgress those rules could be far more serious than a little negative publicity.