The Daily Campus

Issue date: 9/18/08 Section: Commentary

Given the recent spate of sexual assaults here at UConn, it would be reasonable to assume that the university is doing all it can to protect the safety and privacy of its students.

Such a reasonable assumption would be wrong. The university makes available, online and automatically, the residence of every student on campus down to their building, floor and room number. It should be immediately apparent to all that college is a time of intense socializing, networking and, for better or worse, partying - a time where every student has or will meet someone they will want to avoid. Automatically broadcasting the living space of every student on campus is practically inviting stalkers and jilted lovers.

The broadcaster in this scenario is UConn's online "phonebook." This phonebook, accessible at phonebook.uconn.edu, catalogs all faculty and students, graduate and undergraduate, of the main Storrs campus as well as regional campuses. The Web site offers the features you might expect from the White Pages, such as the names, e-mail addresses, dorm phone numbers and even the NetID of students. The UConn online phonebook, however, contains one critical, creepy feature that makes it a potential threat to the safety of our student body - the Web site automatically lists the residences of students living on-campus, down to their building, floor and room.

The university's protection of privacy via the online phonebook would not pass the standard of rigor for a low-level online spamming operation. It should be a given in our modern age that an individual should have to request that their information be shared with third-parties. In marketing parlance, this is known as "opt-in" privacy protection, requiring the individual to make a conscious decision to divulge their private information - and it has become the standard procedure in the modern age for registering for everything from Facebook to the lowliest online mailing list. It is therefore not only unsafe but also embarrassing that UConn's phonebook utilizes an outdated "opt-out" method of privacy protection.

UConn students should be allowed to opt-in to share their NetID, e-mail and living space, rather than opt-out, as the current system requires. The university should advertise the phonebook's existence more thoroughly and let students know that they can choose to make their information available upon that Web site - if, and only if, they really want to do so.

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