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Recent
revelations that Harvard University had secretly photographed around 2,000
students as part of an attendance study has sparked a massive privacy row at
the Ivy League institution.
According
to reports, cameras that captured images every minute were placed in 10
classrooms around campus during the Spring 2014 semester. A computer program
later scanned all of the images to determine how many empty and full seats
there were during lectures. Students and professors were not told the study was
being conducted.
The
study, conducted by Harvard's Initiative for Learning and Teaching, was
authorized by the school's Institutional Review Board.
It
was first disclosed at a faculty meeting Tuesday and later reported in The
Harvard Crimson student newspaper.
The
matter was brought up by Computer Science professor Harry Lewis, who first
learned about the surveillance from two unidentified colleagues.
“Just
because technology can be used to answer a question, doesn’t mean that it
should be,” the Crimson cited Lewis as saying during the
meeting. “And if you watch
people electronically and don’t tell them ahead of time, you should tell them
afterward.”
He
would go on to demand that all the students and faculty involved in the study
would be made aware their photographs had been taken.
“You
should do studies only with the consent of the people being studied,”
the Boston Globe reported Lewis as saying.
Harvard
President Drew Faust said that she was taking the issue "very seriously" and
would have the study reviewed.
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In
a statement, Harvard said Vice Provost Peter Bol, the professor tasked with
conducting the study, had already reached out to every faculty member who was
involved. It added that Bol would provide all of them with “full details.”
"In
addition, Bol has committed to informing every student – using enrollment data
– whose image may have been captured anonymously and subsequently destroyed as
part of the research," the Boston Globe cites
the statement as saying.
Bol
said that all of the professors whose lectures were observed were told in
August, noting that all had given permission for the data to be used in the
study. Although the students were not informed, he noted that all of their
images had been destroyed.
Acknowledgement
of the study comes over a year after it was revealed that university
administrators had searched the email accounts of 16 deans. The search was
conducted to determine who had leaked information to the media regarding a
cheating scandal involving more than 100 students. Since then, new privacy
policies on electronic communication were instituted to bolster security at the
university.
While
students and faculty don’t view secret photography to be as invasive as email
searches, the revelation was still met with mixed reaction on campus.
“I
wouldn’t call it spying, as some people have,”
said Jerry R. Green, a professor of economics and former university provost,
told the New York Times. “But I
don’t think it’s a good thing.”
While some students viewed
the incident as a violation of trust, others dismissed it due to the high
prevalence of cameras on campus and in society at large.
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