Post-Pandemic Future: Implications for Privacy The time has come for privacy to expand beyond compliance to include determinations about what should be protected and consideration of ethical implications, balancing institutional priorities with the rights of individuals. The intersection of issues including COVID-19, student success, and the emergence of the chief privacy officer (CPO) role highlights […]

A satirical student newspaper recently wrote that Stanford University installed facial recognition cameras in the front of some lecture halls to take attendance and analyze the expressions on students’ faces. Though that particular instance isn’t true, the scenario taps into the very real concerns that privacy activists have about the potential application of face surveillance […]

Over the holiday break, two pieces of writing coursed through my Twitter feed in successive order. The first was a Washington Post article by Drew Hartwell on the various tracking technologies higher education institutions are employing to surveil their students. As Hartwell reports, “Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to […]

Recent technological advances have led to tremendous capacities for collecting, storing and analyzing data being created at an ever-increasing speed from diverse sources. Academic institutions which offer open and distance learning programs, such as the Hellenic Open University, can benefit from big data relating to its students’ information and communication systems and the use of […]

A new platform developed by MIT and Harvard University researchers ensures that web services adhere to users’ preferences on how their data are stored and shared in the cloud. In Riverbed, a user’s web browser or smartphone app does not communicate with the cloud directly. Instead, a Riverbed proxy runs on a user’s device to […]