Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cmcd 2372 days ago
Just because the institution does not use the data irresponsibly doesn't mean the service provider will not. Not to mention third parties which could potentially gain access to this data directly or indirectly by listening for the check in signal devices send.

Per the article, this is not being used to help the students succeed, instead it is being used to damage their grade for a lack of attendance. I think most reasonable people would agree attendance is not a reliable metric by which to base a students grade. The exception being discussion based or interactive courses like debate or public speaking.

1 comments

We have extremely stringent security checklists for 3rd part vendors, as I alluded to in my post. Both the vendors, and any of the vendor's vendors, must be able to demonstrate that data is not used for any purpose but the school's. As for attendance, automated attendance tracking has been around for decades in the form of swipe cards, and simply automated a process professors undertook manually. No data is captured that would not have been in the analog world, and professors are still free to have no attendance policies at all schools I have spoken to about it. Granted, that may only be a sample size of 100 or so.