Original Blog post: https://zoeluocj.opened.ca/2019/08/02/blog-2-internet-security-and-privacy/

Internet Security and Privacy – cont.

In this digital era, the number of internal users and online usages have grown exponentially. There are approximately 2.5 quintillion data being generated every day. Because of this, the emphasis would be on how to properly use the data and secure user info. Meanwhile, there are platforms that would store users’ information in their back end system, for instance, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Turnitin, which is the lead of this writing.

Turnitin is an online tool that has a plagiarism detection service to evaluate whether a piece of work is similar to other works in its database. I have personally used this platform several times before. I found it is a very useful tool to validate my academic integrity. However, after I have finished reading “A guide for resisting edtech: the case against Turnitin”, I realized that how Turnitin uses our work is indeed very critical to us. Privacy on academic performance is an issue that I have never thought of before, assuming a trusted platform would not use my work in other usages. In the article “A Guide for Resisting Edtech”, the authors, Morris and Stommel have illustrated the dilemma of submitting work online through Turnitin. Turnitin has been renowned to cooperate with educational institutions to ensure students’ works are original and non-plagiarized. However, according to Turnitin’s terms of services, “If you submit a paper or other content in connection with the Services, You hereby grant to Turnitin, its affiliates, vendors, service providers, and licensors a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to use such papers, as well as feedback and results, for the limited purposes of a) providing the Services, and b) for improving the quality of the Services generally.” (Morris & Stommel, 2018), we, Turnitin users, do not possess the full right of our own work. The authors have criticized that Turnitin has “create a hostile environment” in classrooms, “undermine students’ authority” over their own work and violate student privacy”(Morris & Stommel, 2018). I am not saying that we should stop using Turnitin immediately, but rather, we should suggest Turnitin to amend their TOS, in order to take away the confusion from users and other stakeholders.

Furthermore, there are many educational tools online claim that they will help students to better keep track of their study progresses. Though, not all of them are non-profit, including Turnitin. The fuse that draws in everyone’s attention is from a non-profit educational technology company, called inBloom. It is a company founded in the United States that “aimed to store, clean, and aggregate a wide range of student information for states and districts”(Herold,2014). However, this company only survived for 15 months because they leaked out students’ personal and sensitive information to other educational company. Of course, this action is not appreciated by the students, parents, as well as the society due to the violation of privacy. Eventually, public protests and judgments have pressurized the company to apologize and to shut down. This is not the first time that personal information was being leaked from the educational sector. Students, educators, and educational organizations should pay extra attention to prevent privacy leakage in the future.

In fact, apart from the privacy of academic integrity, the privacy on personal info is also at utmost importance to society. Take Facebook as an example, there was a personal information leak happened in 2018. Since Facebook requested all Facebook users the authority to exploit their private information, Facebook has the rights to sell or reuse all personal info that Facebook has collected, without notice to users. That is a possible reason why Facebook ads were successful: they exploited users’ info to generate possible products and services that may appeal to a specific group of people using the Facebook algorithm. However, while Facebook is making profits from users, it has failed to protect its users. A software glitch in the Facebook system was found and attacked by hackers in 2018.  According to The New York Times, this incident has exposed more than 50 million users’ info, including the top executives, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg, on the internet (Isaac & Frenkel, 2018). To avoid the same pitfall in the future, Facebook has changed their TOS, explicitly stating that “We don’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and we don’t share information that directly identifies you (such as your name, email address or other contact information) with advertisers unless you give us specific permission.”(Facebook, 2019). In addition, Facebook has improved its security system to minimize the eventuality in the future.

To summarize, Turnitin and other educational platforms as a trusted tool for students to prove their learning and studying should protect students’ information and take extra caution in the TOS. Beside of this, all the social platforms that collect users information must have countermeasures to protect users information.

Reference：

Facebook official website(2019). Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Herold, B. (2014, April 21). InBloom to Shut Down Amid Growing Data-Privacy Concerns. Retrieved from https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2014/04/inbloom_to_shut_down_amid_growing_data_privacy_concerns.html

Isaac,M., & Frenkel, S. (2018). Facebook Security Breach Exposes Accounts of 50 Million Users. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html

Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). A Guide for Resisting Edtech: The Case Against Turnitin. An Urgency of Teachers. Retrieved from: https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/a-guide-for-resisting-edtech-the-case-against-turnitin/