Some Colleges Are Using Beacon Technology to Track Athletes’ Attendance. Is That Ethical?

Angelina Katsanis, The Daily Tar Heel

In the spring of 2015, Xavier University piloted new software that uses “beacon” technology to track the attendance of its athletes. The software, called SpotterEDU, was developed by Rick Carter, a former Xavier assistant basketball coach, and its objective is “academic accountability” — making sure students go to class. In every classroom, the Cincinnati college installs a beacon transmitter, which Carter says acts like a “lighthouse” by casting a signal via Bluetooth that is found by the phone of each student enrolled. The professor, coach, and other academic staff are notified when the student is present.

Only one of Xavier’s 16 sports teams used the beacons, as the software is called, that spring, and it found some kinks in the program. So the college didn’t renew the contract. Angela Wyss, director of academic support for student-athletes, remembers that the university recommended that Spotter expand to larger universities with bigger rosters, where it might get more use.

Now, more than two dozen colleges use SpotterEDU to track the attendance of students, athletes, or both. And once the company fine-tuned its program, three Xavier teams now use it as well. For colleges looking to save money and raise graduation rates, the software makes sense, as it eliminates the need for and is more foolproof than human class-checkers. But SpotterEDU has also raised questions about the surveillance of students, and about the need for informed consent from all members of the campus community.

SpotterEDU works through Bluetooth, differentiating itself from other apps that use GPS tracking or other location-based services. For a team to use the program, the students’ class schedules are sent to the company to be uploaded to the software by Spotter staff members. Once that happens, the app on a student’s phone will come to life 30 minutes before class and shut off 10 minutes after the class ends, noting any times when the student arrives and leaves. “We can be very accurate, and it’s not invasive because it’s only during their class time,” Carter said.

Among its clientele, SpotterEDU boasts large Southern universities such as Auburn, Texas A&M, and Arkansas, and some smaller institutions, such as Xavier and McNeese State University. No matter the size of the institution, athletics departments have turned to Spotter to save money by doing away with human class-checkers, often graduate students who do it for extra money.

“It’s not like paying a salary, it’s not paying benefits, it’s not paying a $12,000 stipend a year,” said Alexandra Haley, director of student-athlete services at McNeese State, in Louisiana. “It’s much more affordable than that.”

The program’s benefits are academic, too. Haley said she had seen grades go up since McNeese State started using the app. “Half the battle is going to class,” Haley said. “If we can win half that battle by figuring out if they’re going or not, then we have a better chance at our students’ graduating, which is the ultimate goal.”

But some institutions have put the system in place without fully consulting everyone involved. When the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill started installing SpotterEDU for its football and basketball teams, Barbara Friedman, an associate professor of journalism, had the beacon removed from her classroom. “Tracking student-athletes’ whereabouts with an app infantilizes them, and I can’t imagine it helps to discover and address the conditions that lead to them to miss class in the first place,” Friedman told The Daily Tar Heel.

Lawrence R. (Bubba) Cunningham, athletics director at Chapel Hill, said the university probably could have been more forthright with its plan to install the beacons, but it intends to continue with the system. Next year, Chapel Hill will transition to its own beacon system, called UNC Check-In, an app created by Viji Sathy, a teaching associate professor in psychology and neuroscience, for the faculty.

“I think that at universities, it’s very important to have a conversation about the ethics of bringing new technologies in,” said Katelyn Esmonde, a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University who studies the ethics of digital tracking. “I would be pretty angry if they just installed these in my classroom and never told me or talked to me about it.”

Compared with other students, athletes are a vulnerable population because of their dependence on the college for scholarships, Esmonde said. And because athletes are so accustomed to being monitored through class checkers or school-provided tablets, many become apathetic about new instances of surveillance.

One athlete at a large Southern university, who asked that neither he nor his institution be identified because he worried about retribution from coaches, said that his university requires all football players to have SpotterEDU but mandates it for other sports only if students do not meet a certain grade-point average. When the university installed the beacons, the athlete said, most people didn’t mind that much, but some felt it was “petty” and “annoying.” Also, even though Spotter does not use GPS tracking, meaning it cannot locate students outside of their classrooms, the athlete said, “no one really believes that. People believe that you can actually check the location if we aren’t there.”

Haley said that she gets similar resistance from athletes at McNeese State. She explains to them that she doesn’t know where they are on Saturday night and doesn’t want to know, either. Wyss said athletes at Xavier also objected to the new technology because “they don’t want anyone in their business. Period.”

Carter emphasizes that privacy is a top priority for Spotter, and as such the company has access only to athletes’ schedules, names, and email addresses. Esmonde, whose research focuses on this kind of digital tracking, cautions that even such access might be more than some students are comfortable with.

“I think informed consent would be an issue here,” Esmonde said. “I wonder about the students, and if they’re really given much of an opportunity to say, ‘No. I would prefer that you track me another way.’”

Corrections (11/12/2019, 1:25 p.m.): This article originally stated that Spotter’s beacon transmitters search for students’ phones. It is the phones that search for the beacons. In addition, UNC-Chapel Hill has already been running a pilot test of its own beacon system, UNC Check-In, which was developed for the faculty, not the athletics department. The university will transition to that system next year. The article has been updated to reflect those corrections.

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.