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Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines,
tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands
By Drew Harwell
Dec 24 2019
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/24/colleges-are-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-machines-tracking-locations-hundreds-thousands/>

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s
Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth
beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with
an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging
their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and
can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts
students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never
been so full.

“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting
on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”

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.”

Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth
transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’
movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi
networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data
points per student every day.

School and company officials call location monitoring a powerful
booster for student success: If they know more about where students
are going, they argue, they can intervene before problems arise. But
some schools go even further, using systems that calculate
personalized “risk scores” based on factors such as whether the
student is going to the library enough.

The dream of some administrators is a university where every student
is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that
are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed.

But some educators say this move toward heightened educational
vigilance threatens to undermine students’ independence and prevents
them from pursuing interests beyond the classroom because they feel
they might be watched.

“These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a
student population because it serves their interests, in terms of the
scholarships that come out of their budget, the reputation of their
programs, the statistics for the school,” said Kyle M. L. Jones, an
Indiana University assistant professor who researches student privacy.

“What’s to say that the institution doesn’t change their eye of
surveillance and start focusing on minority populations, or anyone
else?” he added. Students “should have all the rights,
responsibilities and privileges that an adult has. So why do we treat
them so differently?”

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