"Don't spy on a privacy lab" (and other career advice for university provosts)

from Cory Doctorow

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sensorship

Northeastern's Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the "Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute," where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there's one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.\
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Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern's Senior Vice Provost for Research decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. The provost signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.

After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.

#privacy #surveillance #security #grad-school #grad-students #northwestern-university #cybersecurity #doctorow #cory-doctorow #cory