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>Further, this data is actually useful: if something happens, you know who the last people to open the door were. Further, as a grantee of privileged access, yo
by tedks 12y ago
>Further, this data is actually useful: if something happens, you know who the last people to open the door were. Further, as a grantee of privileged access, you know that. You know you can't just say it must have been one of the 200 others with the common key. So it's more invisible prevention than measurable solving.
That's a big "if", though, and in the article, Stallman points out that MIT isn't able to actually show that it's a realistic reason to encourage this sort of surveillance.
I feel like there's a middle ground here -- for example, card readers could store a hash of an on-card identifier, one that the security staff do not have access to in normal student records. In exceptional circumstances, you could de-blind the logs and see if a single person was in the building at a given time or not, but there wouldn't be surveillance and the logs would be useless in the typical case.
A card swipe doesn't show that you're there, though. As a student I'd lend people my card all the time, as would most people I knew.
- delecti 12y agoMaybe that's just a thing where you went to school? I never once loaned or knew of someone loaning their student ID throughout my time at college.
- superuser2 12y agoThat defeats the purpose of "The place got trashed last night, who was it?" However, a lot does depend on how the data is being used. My access pattern is very questionable. I swipe into my workplaces at weird times, sometimes to use the bathroom while coming back to the dorms from a party or something. I try my card on all kinds of doors just to see if they'll open. I've never been questioned about it. I'm 99% certain that nobody is pulling the logs except in response to incidents.
- tedks 12y agoIt depends on the school. A university near me has people watching this data or some sort of anomaly detector running over it in real-time to try to catch parties in dorms. I think that's more than a little Orwellian. Also yes, it eliminates the possibility of dragnet searching. This is by design. Dragnet searches go against the principles on which the United States was founded. If I am not personally suspected of a crime, my data must be sacrosanct or I have been demeaned as an individual. Innocent until proven guilty and unspied-upon until suspected personally.
- superuser2 12y agoSwiping into a building is the electronic equivalent of signing in on a clipboard held by a security guard. That is hardly spying, and it's definitely not "your data." If a municipality were to do this with all the private residences under their jurisdiction, sure, that'd be Orwellian, because then it really is your data. In this case it's MIT's data about MIT's facility that happens to have been triggered by you.
- freiheit 12y agoMost uses of that kind of data are confidential and exactly the kind of thing you would expect campus police or IT to refuse to disclose any details about.
- tedks 12y agoI would never trust campus police with that access data. Police officers are under-educated, often predjudiced, and operate under a shield of un-prosecutability that makes them rouge agents. Further, on college campuses, students frequently are employed within campus police/public safety in ways that would make it very easy for them to grab the data. Were that system implemented (which it should never be, because I thought of it in 10 seconds for a hacker news comment and anything real would need to be much more thought out), the list of card IDs should exist only on paper, in a locked file cabinet, controlled by someone whose job it is specifically to safeguard the privacy of students. Maybe the existing roles that manage grade privacy. IT is even worse. I'd hate for a creepy sysadmin intern I declined to go on a date with to know where I lived or if I was alone in an academic building at night.