ON COLLEGE CAMPUS

YOU AND YOUR PRIVACY IN CYBERSPACE

By Alex Wilkinson

When my mother was young, she wrote letters, lots of them. There were no blogs then, no party photos in perpetual cyberspace, no MySpace or YouTube. News traveled slowly, and not very far. My mother may have known that her sister and father saved the letters she sent them. But did she imagine that decades later, after she and the letters’ recipients had all died, her son would read what she had hand-written in the bloom of her youth? Would she have been embarrassed?

I hope not. But she is not here to say whether she meant that part of her life to be private. In that respect, while she wrote when high-tech meant talking movies and crackling radios, she shared a dilemma with every generation before and since. Like you––like everyone––she could not completely control her reputation and privacy.

Some say that in an age when surveillance cameras are common, bodies are scanned by airport X-rays, viral videos spread on the Internet, and search engines easily find trivia about anyone, privacy is dead. That may be an exaggeration. Certainly, privacy is more challenging.

Emily Nussbaum, a writer for New York magazine, views it realistically. She writes that “every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy: enjoying the attention instead of fighting it—and doing their own publicity before somebody does it for them.”

For you to enjoy the attention, do your own publicity, and monitor your privacy, you need to know what’s possible. Here, then, are some questions, a pre-test of sorts, for anyone who is college-bound.

› Can you take it back?

Generally, no. Once personal information is out there, you can’t control where or when it might surface. Like my mother’s letters, any electronic activity will have a life of its own, beyond your reach. Once you have your own bank account, for example, or have a loan in your name even if someone else makes the payments, you will leave an electronic trail that generates a credit rating (and some junk mail). You can review your credit rating and get any errors corrected, for free, by visiting www.annualcreditreport.com, an official site sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. Do this!

Some online communities won’t forward information such as your email address, if you forbid them to do so. The “if” is important. Typically, you have to opt-out to lock down your information. Unless you are certain that you have taken appropriate actions to opt out, you should assume that you have been opted in, and that the company or service holding your information will consider it theirs to share as they wish.

› Can you hide it?

Maybe. Sometimes. Perhaps you already have a pseudonym, a “stage-name” that is your cyber-persona. If you have an Internet pseudonym, be aware that it’s no guarantee of anonymity. Suppose the pseudonym belongs to an account that has other information about you––information which is personal and correct. Then a clever data-miner can figure out that the pseudonymous person is you.

Encryption (writing in code) is sometimes vaunted as a way to hide secrets. Don’t count on it. For example, when you do an electronic transaction on the web and see “https” in your browser, messages between your computer and the bank or retailer at the far end are encrypted (it’s “http-secured”). A middle-person would have to work hard to capture your message and decode it––which is good. The bank or retailer, however, must decrypt the message in order to complete your transaction, and they may share the transaction with, say, a company that wants you to enjoy their junk mail. Encryption may secure a message, but it can’t safeguard your personal privacy.

› Who’s watching you?

Your friends, for sure. Your family, most likely. Keeping in touch is one of the sweeter things about our wireless, electronic, virtual world. Naturally, your phone calls are known to the person who pays the bills for your cell phone (would that be you?). At college, it’s likely that the IT department is watching your Internet connection, mainly to be sure you are not hogging the channels with huge (possibly illegal) downloads. Since the tragedy in Virginia, they may also feel it’s their obligation to scan for violent threats. On the other hand, nobody is recording your phone conversations word-for-word (although various strangers might enjoy your vivid retelling of last night’s escapades, should you boast on your cell while sauntering to class).

› Do you have any rights?

Yes, actually. You should know about FERPA, a federal law that gives you, after high school, rights to control who may see your grades, transcripts, and other educational information. For a summary of your basic rights, visit www.ed.gov. You should also know about HIPAA, a federal law about the privacy of health information. What happens at the college clinic is your business, and you have rights about who can or can’t be informed. For an official fact-sheet, see www.hhs.gov.

› What’s your reputation?

An unfair question, if this were truly a graded pre-test. There’s no right or wrong answer. There is some answer, however, because everyone has a reputation. To be sure, no one controls it completely. That doesn’t mean you should trash your own reputation as badly as Paris Hilton and Pacman Jones have done.

Quite possibly, you will want to be seen differently in college than you were in high school. During college, some students try out several personas. You might be among the many who present different images to future employers than to last-year’s roommates. Online communities offer venues for creating these personalities and, to a limited extent, for managing who’s within each circle of acquaintances. If an older “you” lingers out there, long outgrown but persisting in cyberspace, put the new “you” out there, too, on your own terms, and show the world: Here’s the real me.

Alex Wilkinson, PhD, is a Professor of Practice in the i-School @ Syracuse University, currently on leave and working as a Senior Manager for NPower NY, a non-profit IT consultancy. He is a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

*Story exclusively ONLINE