About the
GCC Web

Fiscal Responsibility vs.
Privacy of Students

For Fiscal Responsibility:	Just to give you a little background on this issue: I'm not sure if you're aware, but Glendale is in the middle of a pilot program that is what we call Universal Access. And with Universal Access, each and every one of our credit students is provided network access. They're provided disk space on the network to store files. They're provided web access, a standard suite of tools, and e-mail access. Out of the 20,000 students that Glendale has this year, we have found that better than half of them have logged into the network and used the computers in the network at some form or another. Glendale is very proud of our web site, as we have put together a real good information source for our students. But one of the things that we don't do real well is have a communication that is immediate. To be able to get timely information. Our web site is very good, but it's rather static. It does change and keep up to date, but it doesn't tell people necessarily what the football game is on Saturday, or that we're offering this new class... One of the ways to do that is with a portal. A portal is a place where a student would set it as a home page, so that every time they launched the browser, that page would come up, and it would be something they could customize. They could put different areas of the college that interest them, maybe even not-so-academic things. We could provide information on a timely basis and put it in front of those students, and it would be a way to contact half -- actually, more than half -- of our students. Some of you may use these things. Netscape runs a portal for their customers. Yahoo! runs a portal. eBay, even -- as they call it, "My eBay." As you log in, you are able to save your preferences but they are able to present information to you as well as you deciding what information you want to see. Unfortunately, this is technology that is very expensive. We don't have the budget to invest in something like this, and our experience is, when you buy something off the shelf you're doing it the way somebody else wants you to do it. We could develop something like this, but that would take a team of developers. This is pretty sophisticated programming. And there are many other ways that we can spend that time with our programmers and with our technical support. But we've been approached by several companies who are willing to provide this service to our students. They're willing to work with us so we can provide a "My GCC" page for all our students. They could set us up a home page. They'll even support the hardware necessary, the servers. And all we have to do is provide a little information to them. They will allow our students to set preferences, design "their" web page, so that we can now start feeding information that we want our students to see on a timely basis. And as long as we are diligent in just updating the copy, all the technical framework behind it is taken care of. And these companies are going to do this at no cost to the college, because our students are very advertiser-friendly. They are in a demographic that many advertisers are looking for -- 18- to 24-year-olds, and even the 24- to 35-year-olds. And so, in exchange for our allowing these companies to put up a banner ad for a different company every once in a while, collect a little bit of data about the habits of oyr students, we can provide this valuable resource to our students. And we can be much more communicative and not have a drain on our budget or a drain on our people.
For Privacy of Students:	Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. [audience laughs] There is no such thing as a free lunch. And in fact, the 200,000 students each year at Maricopa who are in higher education and are economically upwardly mobile are in fact a very valuable resource for these people. And we shouldn't give access to them away for free. In fact, it is not access that is ours to give. In fact, what we are doing is selling the privacy of our students to these companies for use that may have nothing to do, first of all, with education, and may have, in fact, counter-effects on the education of our students. The second most serious problem facing college students today -- after binge drinking and alcoholism -- is credit. And when we sit here and allow our web sites, our e-mail and the entrance to our informational areas -- educational areas -- on the Web to be littered with advertising that encourages students to buy, we in fact may be undercutting the educational mission of our college.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	I don't know... Part of the college experience is to become accustomed to the real world. The real world is full of advertising. In the real world, you have to manage your own credit. That's not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to provide resources to our students the most cost-effective way we can. And if we can cut a deal with a company that will give us services -- and that's the thing you neglected to mention is -- there are services that we can provide, our services that benefit both us and the students, in exchange for data and exposing our students to just a little more advertising. It's nothing more than they see as soon as they click off our page anyway. I think this is an opportunity that's golden, and we should go for it.
For Privacy of Students:	One of the things that scares me most about this is the prospect of bait and switch. Yes, this year -- maybe with minimal advertising -- these web environments are free, the portals are free, or low cost to us. What happens next year? What happens the year after that? Are these companies going to promise us they're not going to up the ante: either they're not going to raise the fees to us, or that they're not going to ask for greater invasion of our students' privacy? In fact, if we're not even controlling the hardware in these sites, then in fact the potential for these advertisers to harvest information about our students and to connect it with other kinds of information about them, is really potentially incredibly dangerous. Yes, when I use my Fry's card and they've scanned my bar code, I'm giving them some information. I'm giving them information about my zip code, or sub-census area, I'm giving them information about my buying habits. But that's my choice. If the entrance to my class and the materials that my faculty member has provided for me on the Web is lined with advertisers and information harvesters, I don't have that choice any more.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	But it's not really a choice for you to have. We have this resource, and that resource is 20,000 eyeballs. And this is a valuable resource that we ought to be able to trade in exchange for services that benefit our students. And the advertising is just a sideline. All of you see advertising on web pages that you go to every day. Most of you probably don't pay attention. There are very few click-throughs, as they call them, on these sites. It just happens to be an annoying flashing thing up in the corner that you have to wait for, or you click on "stop" in order for you to go on. I don't pay attention to them, and I don't think our students will either.
For Privacy of Students:	Well, if they don't pay attention to the advertising, maybe they also aren't going to pay attention to the educational information that is embedded in that framework. I went to Yahoo! the other day to do a search, and it took me probably five minutes to try and figure out where the advertising stopped and where the information that I was looking for started. Again, educational environments are maybe a special case here: maybe we don't want to marry in students' minds the idea that advertising and intellectual information -- or the critical approach to information -- are perhaps the same things.
[The group of attendees is invited to contribute any point they wish to add to either side of the debate.]
Group Contributor 1:	You mentioned the bit with the Fry's cards. In a sense, you almost don't have a choice when you're giving them this information, because they're making a tradeoff: they're marking up the groceries, and using cards to entice you with cheaper prices, so that you'll use your card and sell out your information. It's the way these companies are going; it's the way the Internet is going. It's just kind of a fact of life that you have to deal with. Any more, it's not your choice. When you go to the DMV and get your license or whatever, you can elect not to have them put your name and address on a mailing list. That's pretty much the only other place you can make that election. But with the grocery stores, who's to say that once they get that information, they won't put it on a mailing list. Do they give you that option?
For Privacy of Students:	I have that right at Amazon. I think I should have that right at Glendale Community College.
Group Contributor 2:	What were you talking about giving to this company that's going to provide a portal site for our students -- anything, any bit of data about our students -- other than the population volume? Aside from the advertising -- do they just get a login name like "arj" or whatever, or is there something else they know about them?
For Fiscal Responsibility:	It depends on site to site, and I would suggest that in negotiating with a company to do this, you can pretty much outline that. But in general, it is having banner advertisments on a main page that also includes the information from the college, as well as collecting data about the habits of our students as they negotiate the Web.
Group Contributor 2:	Is that something they would do with a link, or...?
For Fiscal Responsibility:	Possibly.
For Privacy of Students:	Who knows!! [audience laughs]
Group Contributor 2:	How much are they paying us for that?
For Fiscal Responsibility:	They're providing services that would cost us literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide.
For Privacy of Students:	And they're getting value for that.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	And that's what a good deal is made of.
Group Contributor 3:	Wouldn't that be a violation of the Federal Education Right to Privacy Act?
For Privacy of Students:	One of the companies we just saw said they'd try to abide by FERPA... They'd try.
Group Contributor 4:	Is this something that would be voluntary... And would they provide an ADA compliant page? [audience laughs]
For Fiscal Responsibility:	Most likely, it would be a voluntary basis. A student would have to set this as their home page in order to make use of it -- the idea being that there would be a value to the student, to be able to set a page that can keep some information for them.
For Privacy of Students:	Not all students know that when they walk down that path, that they are in fact providing information.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	Is this college, or kindergarten? [audience laughs]
Group Contributor 5:	I have one issue to add to the side in favor of the privacy of students. Almost without exception, all of the banner ads that are added into the portal sites are there as a navigation piece. You click on it, you go to someone else's site. So all of the federal laws protecting privacy about how their information is tracked in the educational system become moot. The information gathered would be cross-referenced with these commercial sites and what kinds of products they sell. They wouldn't even be our privacy issues anymore.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	But this is also a generation that is in love with stuff. And they appreciate, at some level, having information on new products that they may be interested in, and they'd love to go to these web sites.
For Privacy of Students:	I'd like to point out that this is not just about products. If I'm taking a Psychology course in which I have to research the topic of AIDS, for instance, and I go to AIDS web sites, that information, in fact, may be tracked as part of my record. And if I go to the Democratic Party site, or if I go to the Republican Party site, or some other advocacy site -- in fact, that information may be tracked about me. Are we going to participate in the creation of electronic dossiers about our students that are tied to their intellectual growth and their educational development? We don't know what's going to happen to that information.
Group Contributor 6:	The word "profiling" pops up in my mind when I hear things like this. Is that what's happening here? Can electronic profiling result from this process?
For Fiscal Responsibility:	It's happening quite a bit on the Internet right now, whether you're in a college or not.
Group Contributor 6:	But should the colleges be involved in this? I know they'll be faced with this later, but...
For Privacy of Students:	[using her opponent's microphone in sarcasm] But we're going to save all this money. [audience laughs]
Group Contributor 6:	So there's a price.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	Absolutely. It's not that we're saving money, so much as that we'll be able to provide services that we couldn't provide elsewhere.
Group Contributor 7:	The point really is not whether the student will be profiled. All of us are profiled, by the society which we have created, which monitors our activities in every possible way. Some of it is with good intentions -- even, God forbid, by marketers, who only want to enhance the services they provide you with. Some of them with good intentions, believe it or not; some of them, perhaps, not. But profiling is going on every second of the day. If you've ever written a check or bought anything with a credit card or checked into a hotel or wrote your name and address on a piece of paper and gave it to an organization other than your mother -- or maybe even in those cases... [audience laughs] The question is not whether the students are being profiled. I think that in this case it is part of the responsibility of an educational institution to prepare people for the real world; and so what we should be thinking about is, how can we teach them to deal with the issues on both sides... so that the information that they are releasing into these databases is information that really makes a difference to them?
For Privacy of Students:	Libraries don't track, and fiercely protect, your borrowing "profile" for books.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	You're saying that this data does not exist? That the library system does not know what books I've checked out in the last year?
For Privacy of Students:	Many libraries do not keep that information, and do not collect it, because there are intellectual privacy issues here.
Group Contributor 7:	Every library that I have visited, when I have handed them my card, they pulled up my record and they had a history of all the books I have read. That they don't release that data may be the case, but that it is there -- absolutely.
Group Contributor 8:	I think an issue that's as important as students' privacy is the retailing of American education. Putting a banner ad on a college web page blurs the line between the educational activity and that commercial enterprise. Kind of analogous to "infotainment" -- or, "What's news and what's entertainment?" With most of our news magazines and TV, we see a blurring going on and I think that's something we need to address very very seriously before we even deal with the issue of privacy.
Group Contributor 9:	I'd like to comment for all the libraries out there in Maricopa... The fact is, there is no information saved that tells us about a person's reading habits or what they previously checked out.
Group Contributor 10:	Are these companies going to provide dial-up Internet access for all these students?
For Fiscal Responsibility:	No.
Group Contributor 10:	So they already have an ISP of their own?
For Fiscal Responsibility:	They are sitting in our labs.
For Privacy of Students:	Or in their own homes.
For Fiscal Responsibility:	They could be at home, but...
Group Contributor 10:	The company wouldn't necessarily know everything that they did on the Internet -- just what they did while on their own site.
Group Contributor 11:	I think your dialogue is already outdated... We need to think out of the box and jump ahead and think about data mining.... Those profiles don't become available by themselves.... It's not a matter of the information, but whether Glendale should be doing data mining. We've got the raw data. I think we may have an obligation to mine that for benefits of our own.
Group Contributor 12:	If these eyeballs are so valuable to these advertisers, we have a product ourselves. By promoting our colleges, by promoting our classes, and possibly picking up data that we can help students with -- we should be doing that rather than giving it off to a company.
[The debate period ends, and the group's discussion and reporting activity in response to this issue is initiated.] Write an additional rebuttal for either side Proceed to: More Commentary on Commercial Portals Return to: Introduction to Commercial Portals Danger in the Construction Zone Contents WebDev 2000 Contents