Paul Stewart, a Liverpool-based e-mail administrator, found his new girlfriend online, and he lost her online as well.
The trouble started when Stewart’s Windows Live Messenger instant messaging program — the chat program given out free to all registered Windows users — sent out notices and profile updates about his other activities, conversations, and “friends” to other people on Stewart’s friends list, which included his new girlfriend.
“One day (my new girlfriend) contacted me, very upset, and said that her Windows Live profile suggested that she befriend my old girlfriend, whose name I had told her in an earlier conversation,” Steward told the German Press Agency dpa.
“Then she looked at my Windows Live profile, which informed her that my old girlfriend and I were now friends as of a recent date. It was all very misleading. The old girlfriend had contacted me. I accepted her ‘friend request’ just to tell her that I was seeing someone else. But the damage was done,” he said.
The damage, as Stewart learned too late, was due to the way Windows Live Messenger automatically shares information about a person’s online activities and new contacts with other people on the person’s contact list.
This information sharing is in keeping with the practice of sharing a person’s ever-expanding circle of friends, popularized by such sites as Facebook. But the unintended consequences of too much information sharing can be dire, as Stewart learned.
Windows Live Messenger, which is part of the Live Essentials suite of programs available to all Windows users, shares most of a user’s activity-related information by default — a questionable practice at best. In order to change it, you have dig deep into the Privacy settings.
While Windows Live Messenger is not the only chat and social networking program that automatically shares information you may not wish revealed, it’s one…