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Academic surveillance software company Proctorio is suing a researcher critical of them, seeking to obtain private communications
@Ian Linkletter:
Proctorio is expanding their lawsuit against me and I urgently need your help.On the eve of the BC Supreme Court hearing to dismiss their lawsuit, Proctorio has applied for a court order allowing them to pry into my PRIVATE communications.Our response: https://t.co/jJdQ47P8Pe pic.twitter.com/leCr8yevsx
The EFF also announced yesterday that they're suing Proctorio on behalf of a different student: EFF Sues Proctorio on Behalf of Student It Falsely Accused of Copyright Infringement to Get Critical Tweets Taken Down
I have a lot of feelings about this.
First the obvious; it's shitty that they're trying to use a SLAPP lawsuit to silence their critics. Proctorio's entire business model is shitty in a number of ways.
But more than this, I'm kind of just pissed off at academic institutions in general. They're the people who are giving Proctorio their business. There's a huge difference between proctoring an exam and forcing students to install software that is quite literally designed specifically to dig into their private data.
And the thing that bothers me the most is that there are many other ways that academia is forcing students to give up their own personal resources instead of using the organization's resources.
Certainly the most obvious of these is textbooks and access codes. Universities spend a lot of money to ensure that their teaching staff are professionals who are well versed in their subjects, and yet it's increasingly common to see classes where the entire curriculum - the texts, assignments, tests, and even class structure - are created by textbook companies. While this isn't a fundamentally bad thing by itself, the bigger issue is that students are asked to pay for that in addition to their tuition fees.
Students are not only asked to give away their privacy and even more of their money, but they are also asked to give away their rights to works they have created. In any class where you might have to write an essay or paper, your work will likely be put through one of a number of anti-plagiarism systems. Once again, that's not necessarily a bad thing by itself, but in practice most, if not all, of these anti-plagiarism systems will reserve a copy of your work, and a number of them don't put any limits as to what they can do with them. And for students, they have to agree or be subject to failing their classes.
Linkletter has made his side of the legal documents public.
To get an idea of what Proctorio is like, from July of last year: CEO of exam monitoring software Proctorio apologises for posting student's chat logs on Reddit
Oh fuck off. That alone should be cause enough to not give them any access to private communications. What the fuck.
Meanwhile, covid-era exams over here in germany (I do not claim this is representative): "Yeah, here's the exam, there's the moodle form you use to submit your answers. You've got 4-5 hours for a 2-hour test because we can't guarantee the servers are up 100% of that time. Please list any sources you used. Good luck." Zero surveillance.
Did people cheat? Probably. Do I care? Nahh. This isn't a difficult exam, and it isn't the kind of stuff that will break your back if you're "unworthy" of the degree. The exams can tell the student they're "unworthy", as can many other aspects of studying. The measurement teachers should use to award a degree or not are (imo) not the kind of exams you can cheat on (save for copying other's work). The skills required are much better displayed in a thesis, a project or similar.
I really want to get a higher degree, but I have trouble justifying going back to school with the constant stream of shitty practices that screw over students in the world of academia. Stuff like this just serves as a reminder of how bad it is.