Where to Draw the Cyber Line With College Students
In both Sophie Quinton’s “Are Colleges Invading Their Students’ Privacy” and Young’s and Quan-Haase’s “Privacy Protection Strategies on Facebook,” the authors discuss the issues of internet privacy among the current generation of college students. Both articles are concerned with where the boundary for privacy exists online and whether or not the users know or are taking an active role in protecting their privacy online. All three authors would agree that students know about certain privacy policies but whether or not the students are fully aware of or truly care about where their information is actually going remains in question.
Sophie Quinton’s “Are Colleges Invading Their Students’ Privacy” deals primarily with data captured by universities and high schools regarding the online practices of high school students. This data is then used to determine the “correct” path a student should take in higher education and whether or not said student should be part of a particular university given said online activities. Quinton states that “supporters say this kind of data analysis…can be performed with students’ interests in mind” (Quinton) and that the practice is legal but the boundary between gathering data to predetermine a student’s success at an institution in a given field and using that data to accept or reject students is a cloudy one. My generation of college students realizes that colleges look at social media of incoming students to help determine whether or not the student gets admitted and sometimes students will take preemptive measures to help mitigate the possible risks but the level of data that the universities have access to makes it difficult to mitigate all of the risk, regardless of how much attention we pay to our online privacy. Alyson Young’s and Anabel Quan-Haase’s article, “Privacy Protection Strategies on Facebook,” focuses mainly on privacy strategies of college students on one site – Facebook – but the same strategies can be utilized on other sites. Strategies such as “deletion of content,” “the creation of sub-set friends lists,” and “the use of private modes of communication” (Young et Quan-Haase) have all been utilized on multiple sites to try to prevent data from being leaked all over the internet. More extreme measures such as avoiding social media entirely are also utilized to prevent unwanted influences on significant decisions, like admittance to a college based on what an individual’s online presence looks like. All of these strategies being utilized points to students knowing that their online data is being used for something and that, while they might not know exactly where all of their data is being sent, they do not particularly want all of their data available to just anyone.
One point where the authors differed was that Young and Quan-Haase came to the conclusion that social media users did not necessarily care about how their data was being used, just that their data was available to certain parties, whereas Quinton came to the conclusion that students may or not be favorable to how their data was being used by third parties. Young and Quan-Haase found that “university students were more likely to exclude personal information to restrict unknown others from accessing information” (Young and Quan-Haase), which includes, to an extent, third parties such as advertising corporations or maybe universities. However, according to Quinton, “[Georgia State has] received nothing but positive feedback from students” (Quinton) regarding the university’s practice of “data-mining.” With the same audience, there are two different perspectives on the same practice, which further confuses the matter rather than resolving it. Some individuals do not care or are not fully aware of what is being done with their online data while some students care enough to try to prevent their data, or certain pieces of data, from being found by third parties.
While it is confusing to distinguish boundaries with widely-spread practices such as data-mining when the entire pool of users is not in agreement about how they feel regarding said practices, it is important to determine the major perspectives of said audience to try to figure out where to draw the line. All three authors agree that the practice is not something that is accepted by all and that some individuals take measures, sometimes extreme, to prevent their online data from being accessed, but it is difficult for students to take all the preemptive measures necessary when the third parties have as many resources at their disposal to get the data if they want it.
Young, Alyson Leigh, and Anabel Quan-Haase. 2013. “Privacy Protection Strategies on Facebook.” Information, Communication & Society 16 (4): 479–500. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2013.77775
Quinton, Sophie. 2015. “Are Colleges Invading Their Students’ Privacy?” The Atlantic, April 6. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/04/is-big-brothers-eye-on-campus/389643/.