Philosopher Michelle Mason (Minnesota) writes:
In the wake of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, I wonder if you would agree that now is an opportune time to address on your Leiter Reports Blog what to me has long appeared a capitulation by academics to the corporate University so far as concerns our privacy rights.
I imagine many readers will recall the time they were instructed that their University was retiring their in-house email service and contracting it out to Google. This fallen Luddite made the switch kicking and screaming but, alas, it was a futile battle. Fast forward: We now are supplied with an entire Google Suite of products that it is increasingly difficult to avoid (plea to colleagues: please stop sharing files with me on Google Drive!) Admittedly, Google for Education does not annoy us with ads. Whether they provide our information to third-party vendors is to me less clear (here a lawyer’s eye is welcome!) What then is the problem, you ask?
I invite your academic readers to perform the following experiment. Visit http://www.google.com/history or otherwise navigate to the “My Activity” section of your account and, then, to “Activity Controls.” There you may (or may not) be surprised to see that your account has the capacity to track all kinds of activity in which you engage via your Google Suite of products, and that all this activity is archived in this single place. I have two such Google for Education accounts, since I teach at two universities. By default, one account had all of the tracking activity “paused” (my land-grant University of Minnesota, hereafter dearer to my heart). My other account had the defaults set up so that I would have had to affirmatively OPT OUT of certain tracking, among them tracking of my YouTube search history and YouTube watch history. Further, I am aware that designated University administrators have access to faculty GMail via something called a Google Administrative Suite and, presumably, GMail is not the only Google activity to which they have access via their Administrative Suite. As if this were not sufficient to evoke fears of the University as Big Brother, one also finds in the “My Activity” section this chilling statement:
“Activity may be saved from another account if you use a shared device or sign in with multiple accounts. Learn more at support.google.com.”
I assume that although I might be unusual in having two Google for Education accounts, many academics like me have both personal and university GMail accounts. If I understand, the statement above suggests that activity in which I engage via one of those accounts may (if I am simultaneously logged in to another?) find its way to the “My Activity” section of another. At least, I suppose this explains why my Brown.edu Google account tracked the fact that, in addition to a number of philosophy related videos, I have viewed at least one episode of “Diners, Dives, and Drive-Ins” (the one where Guy Fieri visits Patti’s Pierogi’s in Falls River! [note to New Englanders: not worth the drive]). This, of course, is a funny example. However, I am aware of a case where a professor’s *personal* GMail somehow ended up in the hands of a university administrator who claims to have delegated access to the professor’s *work* GMail account. Perhaps the Google for Education ship has sailed but I would like to encourage conversation around these issues. I'm way behind the internet privacy curve and have a lot to learn; I suspect other professors do, as well.
I took Professor Mason's suggestion, and performed the experiment, and it was, indeed, eye-opening and not in a good way! Thoughts from readers on these issues?
