Graphic by Quinn Sherer | Mercury Staff
Why surveillance technology on college campuses is counterproductive
Imagine if UTD administrators tracked your every move while
on campus. From collecting your location data when attending class or logging
how long you are in your room, how would you feel if university officials could
access this data to conduct risk assessments on your behavior?
Clearly, these intrusive surveillance measures seem like an
egregious violation of student privacy; however, thousands of schools around
the nation, such as Depaul and Syracuse University, have implemented invasive
tracking measures to collect data on students’ class attendance, academic
performance, mental health and more. Although administrators seem to have good
intentions with implementing these technologies to keep students accountable,
they create unnecessary penalties for students, inaccurate risk assessments of
student mental health and perpetuate a dangerous norm of allowing surveillance
technology to infringe on our fundamental right to privacy.
Applications like SpotterEDU and Degree Analytics track the
location data of students either by using bluetooth beacons or logging network
signals that smartphones constantly connect to. These applications are marketed
under the ideas of “helping students succeed” and taking a “reactive to
proactive” approach to helping students graduate. This rationale can appear
perfectly well-intentioned, but it is worth questioning the ethics and
effectiveness of these measures. Students have actually been disadvantaged by
these devices and have been unfairly marked absent while in class or late when
they were on time. Furthermore, innocuous deviations in student behavior can
flag university officials about students and create unnecessary apprehension
for both parties.
The micromanagement of adult students by university
officials creates a dangerous culture of accepting that university officials
have the right to track our every move. Class attendance and identifying
at-risk students are both important. But taking advantage of machine learning
and artificial intelligence technologies to collect data on every aspect of a
student’s life — in order to make potentially unfounded conclusions about their
capabilities to succeed or their mental health — is not ethical. Rather than
encouraging freedom on campus, students involved in anonymous protests or
demonstrations can be quickly tracked down by external companies and
punished—suppressing future student activism. In the event of a data breach,
private student information can fall in the hands of malicious actors who could
use this information to target specific students or certain populations of
students.
The introduction of these technologies is a cop-out. It is
an excuse for university officials to not allocate funding towards hiring
counselors that will accurately assess the mental health status of a student,
and it is an excuse for faculty members to not critically evaluate the quality
of their instruction and instead rely on invasive software to increase class
attendance. Universities like DePaul and Syracuse should take alternative
measures such as expanding mental health resources, evaluating attendance
policies and course content, identifying the reasons why students are not
attending class and taking comprehensive and holistic measures to ensure that
students graduate on time — rather than creating a mini-surveillance state on
our college campuses.