Exploring User Monitoring And Privacy Rights In Online Behavior

I’ve been spending a little too much time thinking about snooping lately. Actually, I’ve been thinking about snooping in all its various guises: personal, corporate, government, and extra-governmental. I’ve never been a big fan, really, even when my duties have required me to snoop. As an ex-corporate guy, my personal expectations of privacy in the workplace are what you’d expect: Never send an email you wouldn’t want to see on the front page. Seven-plus years in a Fortune 100 shop left me with a healthy dose of paranoia, and a strong aversion to sending anything of personal value via email or IM. I encrypt most of what I send from home, twitch when I’m riding wireless networks, and look over my shoulder as I type.

Thus, it's been interesting this year to see my peers wrestling with the double-edged sword of monitoring users' online behavior. We all work at private schools, and rely on varying degrees of traffic control, filtering, and/or monitoring to keep our networks running in-bounds. By and large, we lean heavily toward support of civil liberties and privacy advocacy; all of our institutions have robust privacy policies that are generally much nicer than corporate boilerplate. Many of our online and offline discussions have dealt with the degree of monitoring needed to keep our constituencies safe from outsiders (and, arguably, from themselves).

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