Anti-Cheat Software Company Contracted By Rutgers Fails To Live Up To Privacy Agreement With Students

from the i-see-you dept

There has always been a strong emphasis in educational institutions on stopping cheating. All of this hand-wringing makes sense to a point, of course. With the advent of technological progress, however, two separate roads appear to be heading to a cross: the use of technology to stop cheaters and the question of just how we're going to define cheating as information becomes more widely searchable and available. For the latter, I'm very much in favor of judging students on their ability to find answers and create interesting solutions compared with the originality of their responses. As the saying goes, it's not what you think that's most important, but how you think. As to the former, it seems we can't go a single story about schools using technology to police any aspect of their students without finding some failing in its implementation.

Such as the latest instance out of Rutgers, where the school hastily dove into a partnership with ProctorTrack, an anti-cheating and student-monitoring platform that failed to live up to its end of the privacy bargain with students.

Verificient Technologies, the company behind the student-monitoring, anti-cheating software ProctorTrack, has not communicated to Rutgers students what the company has done with their personal data.

As we reported, ProctorTrack uses remote-monitoring technology to collect audio, video, and document the web activity of students as they take the exam. The software also scans the ID, face and knuckles of the student, and takes a voice sample. But complaints from students suggest that Verificient has not sent out any notification about the status of their data.

Notifications that Verificient was contract-bound to supply to students upon the purging of the data it collected on them. The way this was supposed to work was that all student monitoring data would be deleted from the primary servers after 90 days, with a notice to students, and then deleted form the backup servers 30 days after that, with another notice to students. Aiding in the confusion is that Rutgers had initially told students the purges would occur within 30 days of the test, back when the school had only a verbal agreement with Verificient, as did the company on its website in what it called its "privacy pledge." That pledge appears to have been violated in the name of "we can change our promise whenever the hell we feel like it" corporate provisions.

But the company's privacy policy at the time of the blog post stated that it could unilaterally amend its policies at any time, and that student data could be disclosed to third party service providers or in the event of a bankruptcy or company merger. But the contract singed in August provided for a longer time frame to delete data, and notify students: 90 days.

According to the contract, which actually went into effect seven months before it was signed, students who used the software during the spring 2015 semester should have received email notifications that their proctoring data had been permanently deleted from the servers.

But they didn't get those emails and students are now rightly pissed off at not knowing what the hell is going on with their personal, audio, and video data. Were this about monitoring web-browsing during tests, it would be bad enough, but we're talking about intrusive audio/video data on students and the company handling that information couldn't be bothered to follow its own post-redefinition pledge of privacy notifications. And, it should be noted, Rutgers students themselves had to pay $32 for the privilege of using this software.

So who exactly is the cheater here, guys?

Filed Under: anti-cheating software, data, privacy, proctortrack, spying, students
Companies: rutgers, verificient technologies