No More Clear Skies? No More Privacy?

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No More Clear Skies? No More Privacy?

3/15/2005

By Terry Calhoun

Is your campus IT department "raining on" or protecting the security of student identities?

Thinking about the growing problem of data aggregation abuse and cyberspace pollution, which impacts our daily lives on campus and off, brings to mind comparisons with other assaults on our world.

Eight days before September 11, 2001, my family moved our oldest daughter into her college dormitory in Manhattan. In the days following 9/11 the skies over North America were a constant reminder of how much things had, at least temporarily, changed. We had clear blue skies, we had partly cloudy and partly sunny skies, we had cloudy skies – but there was something missing from those skies.

It was something that drew my attention constantly, especially on any clear day with blue skies. On September 3, we had stood atop the twin towers on a bright, clear day, and watched as a team of a six computer-controlled skywriting planes puffed commercials onto the sky above New York. Then, a little more than a week later, there were no contrails anywhere. Everything we saw in the skies during those days was natural-–puffy clouds, solid clouds, but no contrails. No straight or jagged lines across the sky degrading into the usual modern art canvas that once again covers the skies every time we look up. I couldn’t help it. It made me think, and it still makes me think, over and over again: Who gave anyone the right to take our beautiful sky and trash it with dozens of contrails zig-zagging all over the place. At some inner level I even wonder at the possible overall negative psychic effect on humans, whose brains were not evolved over millions of years to accept jagged streaks in the skies.

The headlines during the past few weeks have been full of news about a similar way the environment we live in has been despoiled – by data aggregators. I am bemused by the way that the news media, even my constant companion in the car, NPR, have handled and described the recent spate of what should be called scandals coming our way courtesy of data aggregators. Looking in that direction, the question is Who gave them permission to pollute our cyberspace in a way that means that very serious instances of identity theft are far more likely, due to their business practices?

This is an important issue on campus because our higher education institutions are data aggregators. The finance office has data, the admissions office has data, the hospital and medical school have data, some parts of auxiliary services have data. And with our brand new, sometimes working ERPs, we are busy aggregating that data. Is it secure? Who do we share it with? If I get rejected by Harvard University, I’m not going to be very happy to start getting spam like “Don’t feel bad, maybe we can help you get into Princeton or Stanford.” If you want to get really motivated by some futuristic thoughts, spend a moment thinking about how all of this relates to students’ e-portfolios!

To give NPR its due, it did give its listeners enough information that one could deduce some of the data aggregators’ business practices. But in general the news stories behind the headlines didn’t do a lot to educate us. Maybe it is that there is something sacred in our culture about whatever means someone uses to make a fortune, so long as it isn’t something we’ve previously declared to be illegal.