> At least one student has received the records, and said he was surprised by what he got back: several hundred pages, including a log of every time his electronic identification card had been used to unlock a door,[...]
It seems totally unnecessary to indefinitely store every door swipe. Sure, store the swipes used to access the rare book room or the chemistry lab for 6 months or a year, but there’s no reason for every swipe into a dorm or dining hall to be permanently recorded. Some amount of time between a few days and a few weeks should be entirely sufficient for every reasonable purpose.
I imagine if the systems that store all the ID swipe data got hacked, it would be possible to learn all kinds of things about students, including embarrassing secrets or enough info about movement patterns to ambush someone.
[I guess this seems like a minor thing compared to records of people’s cell phone movements, internet traffic history, etc., but I think those should be deleted within a few days to a few weeks too.]
This is one of the reasons that Richard Stallman refused to use his RFID card at MIT. If a door was locked, he would just tailgate someone in. Eventually CSAIL just gave him a key to a back door.
My university offers "Shabat" keys, as some students religiously object to using the RFIDs on Shabat (Friday night through Saturday), due to it being electronic.
Look at it from this way, its probably more work to go back and delete entries that really don't take up much disk. Heck, collecting is easy, setting up periodic purges, archives, and such, usually gets pushed to another phase.... which may never come.
another side is, its both good and bad. You can see patterns and alert to changes. You could also use it to prove someone wasn't where others claim and so on. If your really creative you can mine it and try to figure out why so many students are making trips that take time and minimize it to put more time to learning than traveling. Like we route packages in shipping companies, load the truck properly for the route, get students into a route that minimizes travel from class to class
>setting up periodic purges, archives, and such, usually gets pushed to another phase.... which may never come.
Isn't that where security compliance programs come into play? I think someone doing their due diligence in asking, "What is the business justification for storing building access logs indefinitely" would have been able to create a procedure for addressing the storage of these types of things.
When I was at college a friend of mine was being accused of a heinous crime. In the end, he used key card time slots to prove he was innocent. But even with the key card it was a matter of the incident happening like a single minute after he was there. Luckily, all of the key swipes were stored and it showed that shortly after he had already swiped his card etc. Anyways, long story short, it doesn't hurt to keep that kind of data especially on a college campus.
If I tracked 100% of people's activity, professional, sexual, recreational, intellectual, physical, I'm sure an anecdote would arise where someone didn't go to jail because we all had this information to prove he was innocent.
I hope you're seeing how this isn't very relevant however to the question whether we want this kind of monitoring.
I also don't see how your anecdote in any way is a long story for 'it doesn't hurt to keep that kind of data'. It's a story for how 'it can be helpful to keep that data as shown by one particular anecdote'. That's not really the point, I think we all agree we could find a useful application with data, the point is that we may not want these things to be monitored for opposite reasons.
It didn't hurt in that particular instance, and that does not mean it couldn't have been turned on him if one of the readers had failed to record (or for any other reason gave ambiguity to his motions) and placed him incorrectly where the crime took place, nor that the practice is inherently good because it exonerated one person. Any more than potentially proving that you weren't at another crime scene makes storing all of your cell phone metadata inherently OK.
Yes, they have this potential benefit, but no, they should not be reviewed solely in that context.
I'll agree that the crimes committed by these individuals took a long time to come to light, but I don't see that either had any relevance to the discussion about retention of data that could be used to track their movements. Saville didn't escape discovery because there was no proof of his movements. He escaped because those who were harmed by him were cowed into silence, or ignored by those whose job it was to help.
As for Shipman, wasn't it precisely because of anomalies in data collected about him that he was caught? And do you agree that collecting clinical data about doctor's use of drugs, and their outcomes vs. statistical norms might be reasonably exempted from the kind of personal data logging that many people find objectionable [me!]
It seems totally unnecessary to indefinitely store every door swipe. Sure, store the swipes used to access the rare book room or the chemistry lab for 6 months or a year, but there’s no reason for every swipe into a dorm or dining hall to be permanently recorded. Some amount of time between a few days and a few weeks should be entirely sufficient for every reasonable purpose.
I imagine if the systems that store all the ID swipe data got hacked, it would be possible to learn all kinds of things about students, including embarrassing secrets or enough info about movement patterns to ambush someone.
[I guess this seems like a minor thing compared to records of people’s cell phone movements, internet traffic history, etc., but I think those should be deleted within a few days to a few weeks too.]