Do Not Implement Device Location for Student Services

In "Local universities tap device location for student services" (Stephen Withers, IT Wire, 9 March 2016), several senior Australian university staff are reported to be enthusiastic about technology for tracking students on campus, via their mobile devices. This is a very bad idea. Perhaps the staff should try it themselves, before subjecting students to such an unnecessary privacy intrusion.

On a visit to a research lab in Cambridge (UK) I remember being issued with an active badge the lab had developed. In theory, this tracked everyone in the building. But this was so intrusive everyone took them off as soon as they got to work.

The applications discussed in Stephen Withers' article do not need intrusive tracking of individuals. As an example, you do not need to track students to know when there is a vacant study space in the library. Nor do you need to track the students, in order for them to be able to ask a librarian a question.

Students can use e-leaning tools, or their own social media, to contact their study group members. They do not need the university reporting their location to other students. The risks of having student's locations being broadcast to potential attackers, on a campus operating 24 hours a day, should be obvious.

The idea of personalized information on digital signs is, apart from being Orwellian, a waste of money. If you want to send the student personalized way-finding information, then send it to their phone. There is no need to breech privacy by displaying personal information on large public screens.

There is no need to track every student in order to measure room occupancy.

A surveillance system tracking every student on campus
would do not improve safety. Simple layout design changes do.

Rather than language specific custom video signs, universities should implement standard international way-finding symbols on low cost, low energy fixed signs, so everyone can find their way.

A tacking system would be pointless for detecting if a student has every used the library, as libraries moved on-line years ago.

Student engagement can be easily measured in well designed courses. In such courses there are regular activities for the students, for which the students are provided with feedback. It is then very easy to see which students are not engaged. As an example, see my "Evolving an International Online Course. 

Privacy Preserving Data Integration Strategies

Professor Bradley Malin, Vanderbilt University (Nashville, USA), will speak on "Towards Practical Private Data Integration and Analysis" 4pm 26 August 2013, in the famous room N101 at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Towards Practical Private Data Integration and Analysis

Assoc Prof Bradley Malin (Vanderbilt University, Nashville)

DATE: 2013-08-26
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101

ABSTRACT:

Over the past decade, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that data devoid of explicit identifiers can be linked back to the identities of the individuals from which it was derived. This has made organizations increasingly apprehensive about sharing person-specific information. Yet, with the dawn of the big data age upon us, it is imperative that data sharing proliferate to ensure that researchers can validate published research findings, combine datasets to discover novel associations, and comply with open data initiatives. In this talk, I will review recent research on privacy preserving data integration strategies that are efficient, effective, and obscure personal identities in the process. This talk will further illustrate how such integration can enable biomedical association studies while obfuscating the identities of the corresponding participants.

BIO:

Bradley Malin, Ph.D., is the Vice Chair for Research and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. He is also an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and is Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society. He is the founder and current director of the Health Information Privacy Laboratory (HIPLab), conducts technologies that enable privacy in the context of real world organizational, political, and health information architectures. Dr. Malin's research has been cited by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and featured in popular media outlets, including Nature News, Scientific American, and Wired magazine. He has received several awards of distinction from the American and International Medical Informatics Associations and, in 2009, he was honored as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. Dr. Malin completed his education at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, where he received a bachelor's in biological sciences, a master's in data mining and knowledge discovery, a master's in public policy and management, and a doctorate in computer science.