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c74ds

37 karma · joined November 9, 2021

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c74ds··on ProctorU is dystopian spyware
I'm too intimidated to write it up publicly (though I detailed it all internally). A competitor of ProctorU, Proctorio, filed suit against a guy in a similar position to mine at a Canadian university. We're a big enough institution that others look to us for guidance, so I hope our de-facto moratorium on using these tools serves as an example.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...

c74ds··on ProctorU is dystopian spyware
I worked with ProctorU in a university setting. Refreshingly, our (very large, public) school did not really want to use the platform, cautioned strongly against it, and were well aware of how invasive it was. They were worried about the potential for student outrage via media channels as a result of the race-based inaccuracies and biases and other issues that were coming up in the media. Oh and ProctorU had a data breach, which students happily reminded the institution of. A very small minority of instructors insisted on using it, and that's what I was helping with.

Seeing the backend of this tool was much more worrying than being subjected to it. Simply put, the platform is SO bad, that it could not be used as evidence even in the most blatant cheating cases - for example, the screen capture feed and the webcam feed were two separate files, neither of which was time stamped. If a student had a poor or marginal connection, these two recordings would get out of sync and could never be reconciled. It was so primitive it was laughable. That's on top of the issues you'll find documented elsewhere.