Obviously you can't install them during the middle of a class.
>without student knowledge or consent
It is not the student's desks. You aren't informed or asked consent when you walk into a business with CCTV cameras.
>when pressed for an explanation, students were told this was part of a study on "desk usage,"
Which would be useful data for allocating classes to classrooms or building new classrooms.
>After that, the students at the Privacy Institute, which specialize in studying surveillance and reversing its harm, started removing the sensors
Which is illegal since it isn't their property.
Overall this data collection was being done in a privacy respecting way and the students in the story were overreacting over documenting desk occupancy. Taking attending is less privacy preserving and that happens a lot in education.
> Overall this data collection was being done in a privacy respecting way
and yet, I read
> Luzzi had claimed the devices were secure and the data encrypted, but Privacy Institute students learned they were relatively insecure and unencrypted
...
> Which is illegal since it isn't their property.
and yet, I read
> deployed without IRB approval even though human subjects were at the center of the so-called study
For me, this is was perhaps the most important message,
> many members of the computer science department were also in a union, and thus networked together for a quick mass response.
These were installed in grad student offices, and as far as I can tell not in classroom spaces
It’s equivalent to your employer installing monitoring devices in your assigned desk and saying “trust us, we’ll anonymize the data”. And the administration got caught lying about submitting to the institutional review board
So traffic counting items on roads to optimize road flow cannot be done?
Stores cannot track purchases to optimize products and ads?
Epidemiologists cannot look at large trends to determine allocation of medicine without getting consent of every person in a society?
And on and on?
There are plenty of places that it's both legal and useful (and even moral or right if you like those words) to gather data about humans and actions and behavior without the possibility or efficacy to get "informed consent".
>Difference here of course is that subjects are being measured in a way which is almost definitely not fully anonymous.
There's no way to conclude that from the article. The devices are designed to measure if a seat is being used, not take blood samples or record PII.
If that data simply ends up being total # of seat hours in a given class, or seat-hours by time of day, then that's far more anonymous than a routine traffic cam tracking traffic flow, or tons of other things not requiring IRB review.
It sounds more like the usual outrage spin. Maybe they'll simply use common security cameras in each room, and count people by face recognition :)
Different, yes, and probably not as serious. That doesn't mean it's always OK. Researchers obviously could not install cameras in bathrooms, for instance.
Tracking the movements of a person throughout the day without their knowledge is, by most people's standards, creepy as all hell.
