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upstart writes:

Inside the bitter campus privacy battle over smart building sensors:

"The initial step was to ... see how these things behave," says Herbsleb, comparing the Mites sensors to motion detectors that people might want to test out. "It's purely just, 'How well does it work as a motion detector?' And, you know, nobody's asked to consent. It's just trying out a piece of hardware."

Of course, the system's advanced capabilities meant that Mites were not just motion detectors—and other department members saw things differently. "It's a lot to ask of people to have a sensor with a microphone that is running in their office," says Jonathan Aldrich, a computer science professor,  even if "I trust my coworkers as a general principle and I believe they deserve that trust." He adds, "Trusting someone to be a good colleague is not the same as giving them a key to your office or having them install something in your office that can record private things." Allowing someone else to control a microphone in your office, he says, is "very much like giving someone else a key."

As the debate built over the next year, it pitted students against their advisors and academic heroes as well—although many objected in private, fearing the consequences of speaking out against a well-funded, university-backed project.

In the video recording of the town hall obtained by MIT Technology Review, attendees asked how researchers planned to notify building occupants and visitors about data collection. Jessica Colnago, then a PhD student, was concerned about how the Mites' mere presence would affect studies she was conducting on privacy. "As a privacy researcher, I would feel morally obligated to tell my participant about the technology in the room," she said in the meeting. While "we are all colleagues here" and "trust each other," she added, "outside participants might not."

Attendees also wanted to know whether the sensors could track how often they came into their offices and at what time. "I'm in office [X]," Widder said. "The Mite knows that it's recording something from office [X], and therefore identifies me as an occupant of the office." Agarwal responded that none of the analysis on the raw data would attempt to match that data with specific people.

At one point, Agarwal also mentioned that he had gotten buy-in on the idea of using Mites sensors to monitor cleaning staff—which some people in the audience interpreted as facilitating algorithmic surveillance or, at the very least, clearly demonstrating the unequal power dynamics at play.

A sensor system that could be used to surveil workers concerned Jay Aronson, a professor of science, technology, and society in the history department and the founder of the Center for Human Rights Science, who became aware of Mites after Widder brought the project to his attention. University staff like administrative and facilities workers are more likely to be negatively impacted and less likely to reap any benefits, said Aronson. "The harms and the benefits are not equally distributed," he added.

Similarly, students and nontenured faculty seemingly had very little to directly gain from the Mites project and faced potential repercussions both from the data collection itself and, they feared, from speaking up against it. We spoke with five students in addition to Widder who felt uncomfortable both with the research project and with voicing their concerns.

Original Submission