Without policy, Internet privacy in question
Joel Pavelski
Issue date: 10/29/09 Section: News
"I don't want to be in a situation where people say 'he has an account, he's checking on everybody,'" he said. "It would bother me if people thought that our modus operandi was spying."
Information Technology Services does not have a written privacy policy. There is the Acceptable Use Policy, which protects users from other users on the network and protects administrators who take action from users who abuse the network, but there is no mechanism to protect the privacy of users from administrators.
The Acceptable Use Policy states: "Users must respect the privacy of others. For example, users shall not intentionally seek information on, obtain copies of, or modify files, other data, or passwords belonging to others, or represent themselves as another user unless explicitly authorized to do so by that user."
The college's internet service provider, Merit Inc., does have a privacy policy that disallows the ISP from selling user information to third parties.
But there's no policy preventing administrators or ITS from delving into the private information of network users.
ITS has the capability within the system to view all e-mails sent and received, view any stored files, view and command any campus computer at any time, whether in use by a student or not, and track or record internet usage.
David Zenz, the executive director of ITS, said that even though the system administrators have the capability to do such things, they choose not to.
"We certainly do not as a matter of course track what people are doing or the e-mails they're transacting," he said.
According to Zenz, ITS never tracks any information specific to user accounts, because they do not have time and simply don't want to figure out what individual users are doing.
"It's just not interesting when people today are offering up that information for free in Twitter and Facebook," he said.
Reserving the ability to pry into user information would important if an investigation was necessary, legal or otherwise, Zenz said, citing past examples of missing persons and pornography-viewing library patrons.
Information Technology Services does not have a written privacy policy. There is the Acceptable Use Policy, which protects users from other users on the network and protects administrators who take action from users who abuse the network, but there is no mechanism to protect the privacy of users from administrators.
The Acceptable Use Policy states: "Users must respect the privacy of others. For example, users shall not intentionally seek information on, obtain copies of, or modify files, other data, or passwords belonging to others, or represent themselves as another user unless explicitly authorized to do so by that user."
The college's internet service provider, Merit Inc., does have a privacy policy that disallows the ISP from selling user information to third parties.
But there's no policy preventing administrators or ITS from delving into the private information of network users.
ITS has the capability within the system to view all e-mails sent and received, view any stored files, view and command any campus computer at any time, whether in use by a student or not, and track or record internet usage.
David Zenz, the executive director of ITS, said that even though the system administrators have the capability to do such things, they choose not to.
"We certainly do not as a matter of course track what people are doing or the e-mails they're transacting," he said.
According to Zenz, ITS never tracks any information specific to user accounts, because they do not have time and simply don't want to figure out what individual users are doing.
"It's just not interesting when people today are offering up that information for free in Twitter and Facebook," he said.
Reserving the ability to pry into user information would important if an investigation was necessary, legal or otherwise, Zenz said, citing past examples of missing persons and pornography-viewing library patrons.
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