Short-range
phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges
across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more
precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology
to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or
assess their mental health.
But
some professors and education advocates argue that the systems
represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’ privacy
on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize
students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults,
further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living,
whether they like it or not.
“We’re
adults. Do we really need to be tracked?” said Robby Pfeifer, a
sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which
recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the
campus’ WiFi network. “Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? …
And is it just going to keep progressing until we’re micromanaged every
second of the day?”
This
style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many
Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an
online backbone, now can measure people’s activity and whereabouts with
striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend
lines that companies promise to help optimize.
Americans
say in surveys they accept the technology’s encroachment because it
often feels like something else: a trade-off of future worries for the
immediacy of convenience, comfort and ease. If a tracking system can
make students be better, one college adviser said, isn’t that a good
thing?
But
the perils of increasingly intimate supervision — and the subtle way it
can mold how people act — have also led some to worry whether anyone
will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far. “Graduates
will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social
credit systems,” one commenter on the Slashdot message board said. “Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984.”
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