An inexcusable failure

Enough ink has been spilled on these pages over the new residential college adviser alcohol policies and Public Safety dorm patrols to make me fear that entering those debates will induce reader nausea, that most heinous of columnist sins. My fellow pundits have done well to emphasize that the new policies should never have been developed without student input and, in the case of the Public Safety patrols, should absolutely not have been implemented without notifying students. Administrative secrecy is a fundamental enemy of student liberty.

I want to call attention to another student rights issue. Did you know that every time you prox yourself into a building on campus, a record of your entry is kept in a database? Don't be surprised if this is news to you. It was news to me when I found out about it recently, and that was only because I came across a New York Times article from 1998 detailing the hot campus debate over what was then a controversial student privacy issue. Just nine years ago, students were fiercely debating whether maintaining a database of prox entries was a legitimate administrative function for the University; now, I wager that very few students know about the system at all.

To the administration's credit, there are strict guidelines for determining when the records may be accessed. The guidelines stipulate that the records are to be accessed only for routine maintenance, legitimate emergencies or legal necessity. I applaud the administration for placing these sensible restrictions on the use of such private data.

Yet I must criticize the administration — specifically Public Safety and the Tiger Card Office — for inexcusably failing to inform students about the existence of the database and the guidelines governing its use. Everyone knows about campus safety measures, like blue-light telephones, and we cannot avoid guilt-tripping reminders of how many pages we've printed, thanks to the Office of Incriminating Technology. So why are students not informed about a database that records every time we enter our dorm buildings?

Let me be clear: I do not oppose the database. In fact, I think it's a smart idea. But I cannot fathom why Public Safety and Tiger Card make no effort to inform students about it. Granted, if students want to learn about the policies for accessing the database, they are free to visit the Tiger Card or Public Safety websites and read the policies. But that means no one would discover the policies unless they were already concerned about a system that they do not know exists! Putting the policies on an obscure website is no substitute for making them widely known. I'm glad that police officers don't follow this logic: Instead of reading your rights during an arrest, they'd tell you that you can read all about them on their website.

From what I've been able to gather, the Tiger Card Office's position is that informing students of these routine security measures is neither necessary nor feasible. It's not necessary to inform students that information they would reasonably expect to be private and not recorded — namely, when they enter campus buildings — is in fact recorded in a database, linked to their name and possibly subject to subpoenas? Now that's a howler. You might as well not inform students of the Honor Code or the University's alcohol policy.

And it's not feasible to inform students of the database? I beg to differ. Whenever students pick up their keys in September they get scads of pamphlets from OIT. Surely it's feasible for Public Safety or the Tiger Card office to distribute pamphlets at the beginning of each year informing students of the database and their rights with respect to it. It would also be feasible to automatically store records of when the database is accessed, so that illegitimate uses of the data can be identified and stopped.

The administration, therefore, has been grossly negligent in informing students about this important privacy issue. It has also neglected to build any accountability into the system. Now that the system has been in place for so many years, its continued use should be up for debate. The system is legitimate only if the breach of privacy that it involves is outweighed by the benefits of its proper use; it follows that we cannot evaluate the system if we are kept in the dark about how it has been used. We need to know whether and to what extent the database has been put to legitimate use for aiding investigations and resolving emergencies.

Unless the administration takes these sensible measures, it merits neither our trust nor our support. Matt Hoberg is a philosophy major from Kennett Square, Pa. He can be reached at mhoberg@princeton.edu.