Univerisity of Missouri to Start Stalkig Students in the Name of Class Attendance

New students at the University of Missouri will be required to participate in a tracking program designed to measure and enforce class attendance, according to a new report from The Kansas City Star.  Despite privacy concerns, officials defended the decision as one that will benefit students, as the school's athletics department has already been using the same app, SpotterEdu, to track certain student-athletes.

“A student will have to participate in order to record attendance,” Jim Spain, vice provost for undergraduate studies at MU, said.   Individual professors have to opt-in to using the app, but once they do, students in those professors' classes will not be able to opt-out.

SpotterEDU, developed by a former Missouri basketball coach, is designed to monitor a user’s attendance by "pinpoint[ing] students within a classroom until they leave, providing continuous, reliable and non-invasive attendance," according to the app's website. While the app ensures that students are in the classroom during class times, it claims it does not track students' locations anywhere else.

In a statement to The Washington Post, SpotterEDU chief Rick Carter said that his company works with nearly 40 schools, including major schools such as Auburn, Central Florida, Indiana, and Missouri. Most schools only use SpotterEDU to track their student-athletes; however, many colleges are starting to use the app with their student bodies, like Missouri.

Indiana University assistant professor Kyle M. L. Jones told the Washington Post, “These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a student population because it serves their interests, in terms of the scholarships that come out of their budget, the reputation of their programs, the statistics for the school."

“What’s to say that the institution doesn’t change their eye of surveillance and start focusing on minority populations, or anyone else. [Students] should have all the rights, responsibilities and privileges that an adult has. So why do we treat them so differently?”Jones said.

“We have deep privacy concerns about this,” said Sara Baker, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri. She said that such tracking applications have the ACLU questioning “what sort of privacy rights students might be giving up to attend public universities.”

As always, the question always is who is watching the watcher.  Baker is also concerned with the possibility of abuse. “Like monitoring which students are participating in protests,” she said. Are students being tracked wherever they go on campus? And she worries about who might gain access to that information.  All of these questions remain unanswered.