After college students joined the swarm of 200 million daily Zoom users this semester, experts bashed the company over privacy breaches and concerns about data sharing with third parties. That prompted Zoom executives to start a three-month re-evaluation of the videoconferencing platform’s encryption and licensing.
But online learning and meeting apps are just one aspect of privacy in higher education brought to the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic. Some academics fear the spreading crisis will be used to justify accelerated growth in intrusive observation of faculty members and students, further eroding individual rights in the name of education and public health.
The pandemic will hasten a “race to the bottom to a surveillance society, with very little indication that it’s going to make people safer,” said Chris Gilliard, a professor of English at Macomb Community College, in Michigan, who studies privacy and digital policy.
Privacy issues run deep during this period of expanded remote learning, but they might run even deeper as new protocols and technologies accompany the return to campuses, whenever that may be.
Government Monitoring
International students suddenly thrust online, whether in the United States or in their home countries, will very likely be subject to increased monitoring by oppressive governments. James A. Millward, a professor of history at Georgetown University who specializes in Asia, said China has been following class discussions for years, especially on sensitive topics like Taiwan and Hong Kong.
If that surveillance isn’t new, as remote learning suddenly becomes universal, “someone teaching about China or with Chinese students might be a little more sensitive right off the bat to these kinds of issues,” Millward said. Wherever your students are or will return to when their programs are over, he said, bear in mind what you are asking them to say and do online, and what the consequences for them could be.
That’s in addition to monitoring by political groups like Turning Point USA, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, recently urged college students to share their professors’ online lecture videos. “Now is the time to document & expose the radicalism that has been infecting our schools,” he tweeted. “Transparency!”
Millward and others also worry about the increasing susceptibility of livestreamed or videotaped lectures, and other materials, to being pirated, especially in regions with lax copyright laws or enforcement. That’s not a new concern either, but the ubiquity of online courses makes it more likely, Millward said. With regard to both government repression and piracy, he said, “I’m not trying to rain on the parade of instructional continuity, but we still haven’t really thought through all the implications.”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Online proctoring is another area that has drawn new attention with the shift to remote learning. Proctors take control of students’ computers, demand views of students’ workspaces, and even track eye movements to detect possible cheating. “I hate it profoundly. I will never use ProctorU,” said Juliette Levy, an associate professor of history at the University of California at Riverside. “If you straitjacket students into a digital pen where they are assumed to be cheaters, that’s on us. That’s not the tech, that’s how we use it.”
For applicants to professional or graduate schools, however, the online proctoring is a lifesaver, enabling them to take the LSAT, GMAT, and GRE exams without waiting for a return to in-person testing, a delay that might cost them a semester or longer. In a few cases, when applicants see the technical requirements — ceding control of their computer — they balk, said Stacey Koprince, who leads content and curriculum development for the test-preparation company Manhattan Prep.
But “students for the most part are thrilled to have some options,” she said. “This is an extraordinary measure for an extraordinary time, and I’m glad that it exists for students who are stuck right now.”
The ‘Corporate’ University’s Eyes on You
As colleges come under unprecedented pressure to downsize, from the pandemic as well as the steep enrollment decline that was already projected for 2025, some professors predict that the shift online might reinforce “corporate university” tendencies to track professors’ productivity and use the results as an excuse to lay them off.
“It’s a complicated state of affairs,” wrote Jacques Berlinerblau in an email. He is the director of the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University and author of Campus Confidential: How College Works, or Doesn’t, for Professors, Parents, and Students. “Every time I swipe into my wing, the university has access to data that proves I’m in my office. Every time I download articles from the library, the university has access to data that charts the tenacity of my research and reading ethic. Those mechanisms exist and have existed for a long time.”
But with the shift online, that data and those mechanisms will increase, as might colleges’ attention to them. When faculty jobs are on the line, not just every lecture and assignment, but every interaction with students, will be traceable, searchable — potentially exploitable. “The question is: Does the university wish to draw all the things it knows about me and my colleagues into a narrative about our worth? The move to online teaching,” Berlinerblau wrote, “is doubly concerning because it makes the content of our work available to our bosses. Online teaching is not only built for data mining, but every imaginable threat to academic freedom.”
Gilliard worries that the online shift and the accompanying expectations for effort, productivity, and adaptation could be used by colleges as precedent. “People are traumatized,” he said. But colleges will “apply metrics from this disaster to study efficacy.” That’s disturbing, he said. “If my house is on fire, I run out of the house naked. I don’t do that under normal circumstances. What did I learn from that? You learn that in a disaster, you do what’s necessary.”
Fred H. Cate, vice president for research and a professor of law at Indiana University, considers such concerns overblown. In the short term at least, he thinks tracking faculty members’ productivity will be less a way to pressure professors than a practical requirement to get federal reimbursement under the recently passed emergency economic legislation. To document faculty hours worked, or lost, there might need to be clearer online clocking in and clocking out.
In fact, said Cate, the great stores of data colleges have gathered in recent years have been used not too much but too little. From online exams, homework uploads, and classroom-participation clicks, colleges can learn a lot about weaknesses in teaching and curriculum, but much of that information goes unanalyzed.
From swipe cards and other metrics, colleges also know where students are; what they buy, read, and eat; how often they exercise; and when they’re in their dorms. “And yet very few universities use that data to detect depression and suicide risk,” Cate said. Why not, presuming that protocols are reviewed and that they protect individual students’ privacy and rights? With the pandemic shift to online, and when students eventually return to campus, he said, perhaps colleges can make better use of the data they already have.
Saving Lives or Curbing Privacy?
That kind of scenario worries Shoshanna Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Maybe that student you’re tracking is in her or his room not because of depression at all. “They might have a love affair — who knows?” she said. Surveillance technologies introduced under the banner of health and safety, she said, start “just worming their way into the administrative infrastructure, just being accepted in a manner that I find very dangerous, very pernicious, very disturbing.”
Technology companies are rushing out products and services they say might enable people to return to campus. A company called Stratum has an app that lets employees record eight measures of health suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — temperature, new or worsening runny nose or cough, and the like — and then sends a recommendation to a supervisor as to whether that worker can, probably shouldn’t, or definitely shouldn’t report to work.
So far the service has been geared to hospital systems and retail operations, said Ryan J. Trimberger, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, but now Stratum is pivoting to colleges and schools too. Stratum’s cofounder and chief evangelist, Aaron Ebertowski, said such monitoring “is probably going to be a new normal.”
Nadir Ali is chief executive of Inpixon, an “indoor intelligence” company that offers smartphone, wristband, and other monitoring and navigation solutions through bluetooth and radio frequencies. Those services could be used for contact tracing, monitoring crowd density, and other public-health purposes. His customers skew toward health-care, retail, and hospitality companies.
But, like Stratum, Inpixon is promoting its products to colleges and emphasizing the balance between safety and privacy, and the opt-in nature of its services. Health- and college-privacy guidelines, the companies stress, can be strictly observed.
And yet, beware, said Macomb’s Gilliard. Who pushes medical-surveillance systems? Not doctors, usually, but tech executives themselves, and often based on evidence they compile. Never mind that, in the case of the novel coronavirus, the contagion is from asymptomatic carriers, he said. Consider that even when readings are germane, they’ll disproportionately single out members of marginalized populations because those are the ones who disproportionately suffer from Covid-19 and other diseases.
Then get ready for misuse of that data, Gilliard warned. How long before campus police officers get warrants for crowd data to see which African-American student might have been nearest the freshman union the night of an assault? Is that a paranoid admonition? Not if you look at the history of racial profiling, Gilliard said, or ties between facial-recognition technology and the alt-right. “That’s not tinfoil-hat territory. That’s just, like, follow the trail.”
This, Gilliard said, is exactly the kind of historical moment when insidious practices become mainstreamed — when authorities “are grasping at straws and desperate for solutions,” and “vetting is completely out the window.”
As Zuboff put it: “The issue is not, never has been, and should never be whether we collect useful data. The issue is the institutional frameworks in which these data are collected, analyzed, stored, and applied.”
“This is the struggle of the digital century,” she said, “not the struggle of one disease cycle or election cycle. … It’s a struggle that is measured in decades.”
