Brief
Go to the ViziBLUE websiteLinks to an external site. and review the types of data collected about individuals on a typical university campus. Review the about page for ViziBLUELinks to an external site.; it provides background on how it came to exist.
Examine the various data sources as if you were a student on campus, with the data representing your own. Take note of these sources and consider the potential inferences that could be made about you by combining them.
At a brief glance on the ViziBLUE website, I was already unsettled by the broad range of information that ViziBLUE aims to collect from the student and staff/faculty body via the various services provided on campus. When I opened the individual data sources, I was surprised at the granularity of the data points that they can potentially collect and utilize, and it seems like there is no option of opting out of this data collection.
With the overlap of many similar data points in each data source, it becomes easy to triangulate and pinpoint demographics to identify the individual. Even when some of the data is stated to be “provided voluntarily” by the users themselves, through cross-examination of the data points, one can provide a general persona and make inferences of the individual, which can potentially negatively impact those in racialized, disabled, and queer minority communities. Where some data points are crucial for certain access to necessary services (e.g. diagnoses of disability for accessibility reasons), it might prove harmful in other contexts (e.g. medical records of disability may hinder immigration eligibility).
Though it does mention in AI Data that the university does not sell or license of personal information, “individually identifiable information may be shared outside U-M as required by law, or when we believe, sharing will help protect the safety, property, or rights of the university, members of the university community and university guests” is rather vague in terms of how and what is deemed to fit that criteria, which could be an important missing piece to the current website.
At Langara College, there is Institutional Research that collects and analyzes data for institution-wide policy forming, strategic planning and decision-making. It is not as granular and personal to that of ViziBLUE, and is more related to the functioning of the institution, it feels less intrusive compared to what University of Michigan is doing.
On one hand, it is important to make transparent to the users of the collected data to “help them view, understand and manage their personal information”, however, it also shows how much information is being collected and in situations of data breaches, it can have dire consequences.