Why can our peers see our search history?

Are you signed into eduroam? 

If you are, the University has the ability to know that you visited The Daily Princetonian’s website or app to read this article. It can also find out that you were looking at your favorite shoe brand’s website during your chemistry lecture, and it can even see if you’re watching pornography. 

While you’re connected to Princeton-administrated Wi-Fi systems, authorized University representatives can request access to data about the domain names you visited and the routers you used as long as they have a “legitimate operational need” to do so. It’s one thing when administrators are looking at our internet usage data. But it’s another when our peers can, too. 

Search history can play a crucial but little-known role in the adjudication of academic integrity investigations for both the Honor Committee and the Committee on Discipline (COD). Information you thought of as being private can suddenly appear in front of panels of your peers and professors. 

This feature is not at all obvious to students — we were all introduced to the honor system during our freshman year, but the programming focuses on what happens before an investigation and what can lead to an investigation, not on what actually may happen during proceedings. 

Nadia Makuc ’26, the chair emerita of the Honor Committee, said in an interview with the ‘Prince’ that in programming directed towards incoming first-years, “we don’t really talk about what happens when you have an alleged violation.” 

Efforts to prevent academic integrity violations are good and necessary, but they shouldn’t preclude the University from transparency about the procedures that will transpire and evidence that will be brought forward in the event of an investigation. 

We believe that Princeton must enact a two-fold change in the way that search history is handled during investigations of alleged academic misconduct. First, the University must be more forthcoming about how search history is used during investigations. Second, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) must restrict what specific data is accessible to student investigators in order to preserve student privacy to the greatest extent possible. 

We hope that there will soon be comprehensive discussions between student representatives and administrators about the broadest range of privacy protections that can be afforded to students. This is a complex topic that will no doubt take time and willpower to resolve. In the meantime, however, we believe that the actions we call for are a clear and meaningful way to protect student privacy.

To see how your search history can be used, you’d have to thoroughly read the OIT policies and the Rights, Rules, Responsibilities manual.  This information isn’t hidden, but it also isn’t communicated directly to the students to whom it might become relevant. 

It doesn’t have to be this way — students deserve to know and understand the ways that their data might be used to build a case against them.

But understanding who might request your data, and why, is crucial. In many cases, website usage data is requested by investigators on the Honor Committee and the COD, through which Princeton adjudicates allegations of academic misconduct. 

Investigators can request data from a specific time range if they suspect a student may have used their device to cheat on an in-person exam. For example, if someone were accused of using ChatGPT on a final, Honor Committee investigators can ask OIT for data for the time period during the scheduled exam.

On the COD, ODUS administrators or investigators who are removed from the student experience filter through OIT data. But in Honor Committee cases, which address all alleged infractions pertaining to in-person exams, it is our peers who assume that responsibility.

After the data is requested, the student investigators assigned to a case comb through a packet that includes all the instances a student’s devices hit the Wi-Fi network within a certain timeframe. While investigators cannot see the content of any sites that a student visits, they’re able to know what websites a student visited and when. What this means is that there will often be searches visible to the investigators that do not relate to the alleged misconduct at hand. 

Investigators don’t have a say on whether students are found responsible for academic infractions, and those who do make that determination receive a filtered version of the full data packet.

This degree of access exposes student investigators — who might later end up in a class or social situation with the student under investigation — to a trove of potentially personal and intimate data that is not necessarily relevant or useful to the adjudication process. The number of students able to request this data is not large in number — 17 students sit on the Honor Committee — but the principle remains important.

One issue is that it is not clear whether such data is actually meaningful in making a determination of whether a student has cheated. Samantha Baldwin, a policy and research staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explained to the ‘Prince’ in an interview that a website can show up on someone’s history even when they are not actively using it. An app refreshing in the background, a roommate using a shared device, or even a push notification from an app can all show up as accessing that particular website or app, she noted. Or, for instance, if a student ends their exam early and uses their device for personal reasons, that data may also show up. 

The primary risk isn’t deliberate exposure of personal content in a student’s search history, but rather that allowing investigators access to a broad, unfiltered body of search data could provoke implicit character judgments that have no place in a space of academic integrity adjudication. Imagine an investigator sees that a student under investigation visits political websites that they find extreme and distasteful. Is it possible that such knowledge would unwittingly skew their opinion of the student in question? 

There are certainly cases when it is legitimate for the University to use student search data to investigate academic misconduct. It is useful, for example, to bring internet usage data into an investigation when a student gets reported by one of their peers for taking out their phone during an exam. But the current access policy presents a glaring privacy issue: our peers should not be able to see our personal search histories, some of which contain very private and sensitive information that is not relevant or appropriate evidence for the adjudication of academic integrity investigations. 

The University must change its policy of how student or ODUS investigators can request information from OIT. Baldwin noted that one potential solution was filtering the data available to misconduct investigators. OIT “can redact information that they share as well,” she added. 

Instead of being able to request all internet usage data from a given timeframe, investigators should have to request access to specific sites, like ChatGPT or Claude,  with reasonable rationale. This way, a balance can be struck between preserving the student’s right to privacy and the University’s need to hold students accountable for academic integrity violations.

Beyond reforming its policy, the University must be forthright about how search history can be used in disciplinary investigations. This process should be explained at the beginning of every academic year to the incoming freshman class. A more transparent policy will inform students about the full implications of University Wi-Fi usage, as well as equip them with a complete understanding of what academic disciplinary proceedings entail and what they can expect from the Honor Committee. 

Few students at Princeton may suspect that their search histories could one day end up being used against them. But the University can better balance respecting student privacy with upholding academic integrity by both increasing transparency about what data can be used in investigations and limiting how much of that data is available to investigators — particularly student investigators — in the first place. 

Chair of the Editorial Board Christopher Bao is a sophomore economics major from Princeton, N.J. You can reach him at christopher.bao[at]dailyprincetonian.com. 

Head Opinion Editor Charlie Yale is a sophomore history major from Omaha, Neb. Yale is a Peer Representative. This piece does not represent the view of the Peer Representatives as a whole. You can reach him at yale[at]dailyprincetonian.com.