The final project of group 3 focuses on the data privacy on campus. With many login services being used on campus, there might be a potential issue on the safety of our personal information on schools website. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have been reported to analyze users’ data and sell it to third party companies to make profit. Due to the fact that the schools web services are used by a large amount of students everyday and stores a lot of sensitive information of students such as personal contact information, grades, criminal status, etc. There might be an ethical problem that the schools analyze those data and sell it to another party.
We like the idea that they choose to proposal this concern to ASUC. They plan to set up a committee of both students and faculties to determine the current state of data storage by the University to enforce the transparency of the data usage by the university, which is a clever idea. They also want the university to officially guarantee to safeguard students’ personal information and the data collection against misuse. This is a good idea because this can ensure the university will not misuse students’ private information (of course, if and only if university keep their promise). To reinforce this idea, they also want to establish a cyber security team to monitor ethical use of the data collected by the university. The punishment they set for misuse data is also very effective. Once the committee finds some misuse of personal data, the university should be asked to abolish such practice immediately. They also advocate deleting any personal data that are deemed unnecessary for storage in the university servers, which is a good idea to prevent the university to store extra students’ information than needed and use them other “dirty” purpose.
Group 2’s overall proposal is great, however we found some minor problems in their idea. First, we cannot guarantee that the school does not misuse students’ data just by using this committee. From the interview assignment, I know that most of the tech companies have such committee in their company, but the committee actually does not make any affect on the ethical issue simply because everyone in the company are working for the company and the they only help to make profit for the company not work against the company. Second, I am not sure if the committee has the privilege to read what kind of data is storing on the school’s server, nor to ask the school to delete some of those that are not considered necessary. Third, there are not any legal documents saying what the school should do and should not. The boundary of “misuse” and “deemed unnecessary” are very vague.
In conclusion, the entire proposal is well thought and planed. They spot the potential issue of misuse students’ data by university and offer a working plan to solve this problem. Everything meets the standard of this class and they accomplish what this class expects them to do. Well done.