Categories
Academic

Trust in data: about to be compromised?

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/964273

This story just caught my eye, as there’s that interesting balance between privacy in research and open-ness – this time with legal ramifications. Surely in exposing the data, they will be breaching other privacy laws – e.g. they would have collected the data for a specific purpose, and contract said ‘data not to be released until after death’… Quite concerning.

The folk tale about the academic who accidentally deleted his data is older than the PC, but have you heard the one about the researchers who asked their institution to destroy all their work? No? Well that’s exactly what the researchers behind Boston College’s Belfast Project, an oral history of the Northern Irish conflict, have done.

“The archive must now be closed down and the interviews be either returned or shredded since Boston College is no longer a safe nor fit and proper place for them to be kept,” reads a statement issued by the project’s erstwhile director Ed Moloney and former researchers Anthony McIntyre and Wilson McArthur.

The reason for the dramatic declaration is as disarming as it is simple: within the coming weeks, a court in the US is to decide whether interviews with former paramilitaries in Northern Ireland conducted as part of the project should be handed over to the British authorities. All interviewees, including leading figures in the IRA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association, were promised that their recordings would not be released until after their death: now they could form the basis for criminal proceedings.

 Read full story.
Categories
Digital

Orwell 2.0? De Montfort proposes wi-fi surveillance

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1175516With students expected to become increasingly consumerist after the hike in tuition fees, universities may start to view campus wi-fi as a strong selling point.

But plans at De Montfort University may give students pause for thought about the virtues of an ever-present internet connection: the institution is considering using its network to monitor attendance via electronic chips in students’ ID cards.

Other universities have introduced electronic attendance monitoring, but an automated system using wi-fi would be unusual, and the National Union of Students warned that members would “baulk at the prospect of being treated like inmates under surveillance”.

The plan is outlined in minutes from a meeting of De Montfort’s executive board, which say that it would be “the most foolproof way of monitoring attendance”.

Read the full story.

Categories
Digital

Facebook: Share with Specific Users

When Facebook recently added friend lists, I believed that this meant that you could post information only to specific audiences, but that wasn’t the aim – it was for you, as a viewer, to read information from specific users (so you can remain ‘friends’ with people who you don’t necessarily want to see in your feed).

Mashable, however, has given a great guide re a new ability that Facebook have now added – the ability to make each individual post or status update visible only to the people you want. Mashable demonstrates how to use that feature in tandem with friends lists to get the most out of Facebook without worrying about stepping on any toes or sharing information with an unwanted audience.

Read full story. Thanks to @CanDoCanBe for bringing it to my attention.