Following a CHEM 1AA3 midterm, students have expressed privacy and security-related concerns use of Respondus Lockdown Browser
C/O Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
Due to restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities have had to adapt to online learning for the 2020-2021 school year. As a result, professors have faced unique challenges with respect to teaching and assessing students virtually.
One such challenge is ensuring academic integrity, which can be difficult in an online context because professors cannot monitor the test-taking process as easily. In response to this difficulty, many universities have relied on proctoring software to prevent cheating. At McMaster University, the most commonly used proctoring software is Respondus Lockdown Browser.
Though potentially valuable from an academic integrity standpoint, many people have raised privacy and security-related concerns about requiring students to download proctoring software. McMaster students appear to share these concerns, as many have voiced them on Reddit over the past few months.
Concerns about proctoring software have recently received a lot of attention from students, following the CHEM 1AA3 midterm on Feb. 6, 2021. The Silhouette discussed the CHEM 1AA3 midterm and the potential problems surrounding proctoring software with a student, who has been granted anonymity to ensure that they do not receive academic backlash for coming forward.
Concerns about proctoring software have recently received a lot of attention from students, following the CHEM 1AA3 midterm on Feb. 6, 2021.
This student reported that their laptop shut down directly after the CHEM 1AA3 midterm. They also said that they have been in contact with numerous other students who faced technical difficulties during and following the midterm, including computer lags, computer shutdowns, emails about compromised passwords and multiple contact attempts from unknown numbers.
The student added that, of the students who experienced technical difficulties of some kind, 16 have reached out to the chemistry department.
The student said that as the chemistry department was unable to solve the problem at all, their only response was telling students to report it to Avenue Support or to the Respondus company.
“It should have been [the chemistry department] taking responsibility,” the student added.
“It should have been [the chemistry department] taking responsibility,” the student added.
Jay Robb, manager of communications for the faculty of science, stated that the chemistry department took student concerns seriously.
“[The chemistry department] encouraged the students to reach out on technical issues and get answers around that,” Robb said.
According to Robb, the chemistry department plans to continue using Respondus Lockdown Browser and to give students an additional 30 minutes on exams, to account for any technical difficulties that might arise. Robb explained the chemistry department’s reasons for using proctoring software.
“We need to maintain the academic integrity and protect the value of every student’s credit,” Robb said.
CHEM 1AA3 students are not the only ones to have raised concerns about McMaster’s use of proctoring software over the past month. On Feb. 22, 2021, the Student Representative Assembly put out a statement in support of students’ concerns about McMaster’s use of Respondus Lockdown Browser.
In their statement, the Student Representative Assembly called on McMaster to respond to student concerns about privacy and security and to provide all students with alternative methods of assessment if they do not consent to the use of Respondus Lockdown Browser.
Christy Au-Yeung, a co-leader of the SRA’s science caucus, explained that it was a challenge to find information regarding the protection of student privacy on Respondus.
“The onus is on the university to do a better job of informing students [about Respondus] and giving them the option to protect their privacy,” said Simranjeet Singh, co-leader of the SRA’s science caucus.
According to Au-Yeung, the experiences that students had with the CHEM 1AA3 midterm were an integral factor in the SRA’s decision to release a statement.
“There were issues in that test, some caused by Respondus and some not, which caused the unfortunate scenario and motivated us to act,” Singh said.
“There were issues in that test, some caused by Respondus and some not, which caused the unfortunate scenario and motivated us to act.”
Simranjeet Singh
Singh noted that some unrelated technological issues faced by individual students may have been grouped together with concerns more directly related to Respondus.
However, he added, the additional pressure of Respondus on students’ internet may have been a factor, even for students who experienced difficulties unrelated to Respondus.
Au-Yeung and Singh both emphasized that the SRA wants student perspectives to be heard.
“Obviously [McMaster] can’t change what’s in the past, but moving forward [we hope that] students continue to be consulted,” Au-Yeung said.
Expand upon your post-secondary studies to discover your pathway to an exciting career in health information. Learn and apply industry standards for the collection, use, and analysis of personal health data. Study information management’s principles and practices for privacy, confidentiality and security, and how these are applicable to health information systems. Learn how electronic information management is revolutionizing health care within service sectors: primary care, administration and research.
As the Canadian health care delivery system evolves, so does data collection, health information usage and analysis, privacy and security, and the integration of information systems.
That’s why McMaster University Continuing Education is thrilled to announce that its Health Information Management Plus Diploma program is now accredited by the Canadian College of Health Information Management (CCHIM). This accreditation means that the program has met the strict regulation requirements upheld by both the certifying body and the Canadian Health Information Management Association (CHIMA), the national association representing leadership and excellence in health information management across the country.
This post-graduate, part-time, instructor-led program is an online learning experience designed by leading experts in the country in consultation with professional associations. Graduates of the program are eligible to become Certified Health Information Management (CHIM) professionals, who are in high demand in a variety of health care settings across the continuum of care and within provincial and federal governments. These professionals will use electronic information management to revolutionize health care.
The CHIM credential is recognized across Canada, and our members play key roles in the Canadian health system, including privacy and information analytics, to decision support and the coding and classification of records.
McMaster University Continuing Education provides its learners with academic programs that are well-designed, accessible, and relevant to the professional field. Programs within health information are designed for learners with an undergraduate degree or college diploma seeking to build upon their prior knowledge and skills.
To qualify for the Health Information Management Plus Diploma (45 units), students must complete all required courses for the program. In agreement with CHALearning, McMaster University Continuing Education students will register and complete 3 coding courses offered by CHALearning. Upon successful completion of the 3 courses, students receive 6 units of study to be applied to the HIM Plus Diploma. All program courses are offered online. This diploma program is accredited by the Canadian College of Health Information Management (2018-2020).
Applications for the winter term cohort open on January 2, 2019. To find out more about admission requirements, please visit mcmastercce.ca/health-information-management or contact us at mcmastercce.ca/contact-us.
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By: Sal Sbrega
“We are just trying to get our music to as many people as possible” said Bono, lead singer of the hit rock band U2, in a Time Magazine interview. He was speaking of the deal the band made to release their new album “Songs of Innocence” for a free download on iTunes.
What Bono fails to mention is the $100 million payout they received as compensation from Apple, and the backlash that iTunes is receiving. Was this a bad idea on Apple’s part?
If you care about this music lover’s opinion: absolutely. For starters, not everyone likes U2 and maybe they do not want their music on their phone. If there is anything, iTunes should be aware of is how seriously people take their music libraries. Furthermore, there is also the fact that your album is downloaded without your consent and without a warning.
Could that not be viewed as an invasion of privacy? A Selena Gomez mega-fan living in Toronto seemed to think it was such an invasion of privacy that she contacted the Toronto Police. Of course, it did not escalate any further once they explained that it was not a police matter.
Aside from that, many people who were given the unwanted U2 album did not know how to remove it from their music libraries. Apple responded by creating a support website and an app that will help the user remove it. It would seem that Apple got the short end of the stick, what with having to respond to the immense backlash from the public, and having paid around $100 million in exchange.
After learning all of the details around Apple’s misfortune, I’m wondering why they chose to do it in the first place. Why did U2’s album deserve more support from Apple than any other album in its music store?
I don’t think it was an act of ignorance, as I am sure Apple took polls to figure out if U2 still held some popularity. I think it was an act of arrogance. I imagine that Apple executives were thinking something along these lines: “who doesn’t like free music?” or maybe even “yes! U2 is a great band and are definitely still as popular as they once were,” and of course, “anyone who uses iTunes will be so grateful!”
Clearly, they were wrong. On the other end, it is clear to me why U2 wanted the deal. It was a wise financial decision and they’ve made way more in this deal than they would had they released it conventionally.
Sharon Osbourne seemed particularly angry with the band and wasn’t afraid to say so on Twitter.
“U2, you are business moguls not musicians anymore,” she said. “No wonder you have to give your mediocre music away for free ‘cause no one wants to buy it.” A little harsh? Maybe.
I think she’s right. Thanks to this deal, they’ve gone from musicians to businessmen who profited from their established reputation.
But this isn’t about U2’s arrogance, which was obvious to anyone who heard of the deal. It was Apple’s lack of foresight and evidently bad decision that is the most baffling. Now, they have to pay the price for their mistake. Although, I doubt Apple has anything to worry about with their new iPhone 6 coming out.
Two weeks ago, the celebrity nude photo hacking took the internet by storm. Now the filth has settled and the masses have been taught for the umpteenth time that people shouldn’t be shamed for bearing their body. (That so many people still don’t get that message does not bode well for the future.) As we begin to forget, perhaps too quickly, about this invasion of privacy, consider what this means for your nude snap practices.
To repeat what many others have said, you’re free to do whatever you want with your own body. Do not let this well-publicized incident deter you from taking pictures but it’s important to make sure it is what you really want. There are many good reasons for taking a nude photo – as a means for maintaining a long distance relationship comes to mind, but your significant other asking for one is not one of them. Never feel pressured to take a naked picture. While these are tough waters to navigate as it may involve rejecting someone you love, these pictures are too intimate and powerful for them to be given out due to pressure.
So you’ve decided that you want to send this nude pic. The next thing to keep in mind is extra precautions you should take. While it shouldn’t be something you should be concerned about, these photo leaks have repeatedly proven that the world is filled with turds disguised as normal human beings. I’m hopeful that one day these people come to their senses, but for the time being, encrypt your files and set up strong unique passwords. Apple also has a nifty feature that requires a two-step security check for another device to access your account.
While I’m sure your nudes, in which your lips are pursed and your body is contorted for optimal sexiness, are so smoking hot that they should always be followed by flame emojis, the truth is that you’re no Jennifer Lawrence. There won’t be millions of perverts searching for your picture if it ever got leaked into the public and they are less likely to be leaked to begin with. There’s less risk associated with your naughty pictures, so there’s no real need to change your nude policy due to this event.
That being said, less people caring about your nude pictures also mean there are less people who care about you if they were ever leaked. You are sorely deluded if you think the FBI will open up an investigation for you if your pictures got out. This is not to say that you are responsible for what happens in the event that your picture makes its rounds in your social circle, but simply that what follows will likely take a big toll on you – and there’ll be less help than you expect.
Ultimately, nudies are such a strange and vulnerable form of self-expression in modern courtship that it would be a shame if anyone stopped because of this recent leak. Take these tips into consideration and continue to snap away in front of your washroom mirror. Just stop using that awful flash, it’s distracting from your good-good.
Kacper Niburski
The Silhouette
My mom always wanted big, broad, impossibly large windows.
When we moved into our new house after searching for months, that’s the first thing she said. In a subtle tone that only the stress of three childbirths and years of parenting could bring, she said that it was all so very nice – so very, very nice – except for the windows. “They’ll never catch the light,” she said.
And for the most part, they didn’t. On cloud-drunk days, the house was the center of a black hole with the slivers of ambient light being vacuumed into the corners of the windows. And on summer afternoons when the sun would stretch on a smile that beamed endlessly, we still needed a flashlight to navigate some of the rooms in the house.
Living there for a year, I decided to come up with a solution myself. Though I think of my six-year-old self as a boy soaked in sunlight rather than cloaked in darkness, back then I raced towards my mother with bundles of paper and drawings. On an avalanche of disordered sheets of white, I presented my mom a design that would brighten up her day in all senses: a glass house.
I told her to imagine it. Imagine that the windows wouldn’t be a subset of the house, but they’d be it entirely. Imagine that every day the sun would greet her and me alike with a rosy glow that warmed our feet and toes. Imagine that in all directions the light would be reflected and reflected again from all angles. And imagine that in doing so, the rays of sunshine wouldn’t be blocked by the house but instead pass through it. We would be sunlight entirely, a single point on a wave of yellow, and our house would be lit up daily.
Poring over my scribbles and doodles, frantically pointing to one warped blueprint after another, my mom gently smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “But not now. Maybe later.”
At first, I was dismayed at her hesitance. Here was the life she craved, one with windows for walls, one where light flooded rather than trickled, where every day would glow unimpeded, and where no matter the location, everything would be illuminated in sunshine. It was perfect not simply because it was what she wanted, but because it was so much more than that.
But through the same nuance she used to veil her original disappointment in the little mousetraps we had for windows, she was trying to tell me that a glass house is not what she wanted.
Only 20 years later, after a flurry of facial hair and braces and etching out my own individuality, did I learn why. The revelation occurred on June 9, 2013 (and refreshed yesterday with leaks regarding Australia and Indonesia) during a breakfast of eggs and coffee. As the light dripped through our windows and I scrunched around food while watching television, I learned of the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate collection of nearly all forms of data and metadata both foreign and domestic, and more importantly, what my mom was trying to tell me.
Born in Socialism Poland and raised there her entire life, my mom was stressing to a six-year-old Kacper that while light is important, it is not all-important. There are curtains for a reason, and there will be days when they will have to be drawn, when the light glinting through the glass is overbearing, blinding even.
Though my mother experienced an iron curtain in Poland and though I may be reading into her subtlety with too academic of an interest, I feel that underpinning her words was the innate idea of privacy. Living under a longstanding, parasitic tradition of invasive dictators who minutely scrutinized the actions of the masses for their own political gains – from compiling long, arbitrary dossiers or tracking citizen’s movements with intense vigor – my mother’s experience under a quasi-totalitarian regime led to a deeply ingrained belief of modern-day privacy that is both physical and digital.
The NSA, I feel, have worked against this belief through apparently, though certainly clandestine, democratic means. While arguing against the legitimacy of these constitutional claims is a case law consideration, the important fact is that our private lives have been invaded into for the supposed public good. By allowing analysts to track, chart, dissect and determine relations through our digital data, we are fighting terrorism by ensuring that we aren’t terrorists ourselves.
This, of course, is horseshit. Forgetting that little data serves to support the claim that terrorists have been foiled by such dragnet collection and that politicians and NSA supporters alike have refused to divulge the extent of the mass surveillance, the spy agencies have succumbed to full-blown myopia. Instead of standing as a vanguard against terror, they have wrought it. By collecting all, people begin to self-censor themselves. They may no longer keep a domain of individuality where they are free to influence themselves from other parties and instead comply with some broader mandate. In the act of being charted up, analyzed, and held hostage by their opinions, they may no longer be autonomous.
The freedom that was supposed to be guaranteed through mass surveillance is limited in the degenerate pursuit of it. For though the intentions were good, if they were trying to stop the vulnerability against a global threat by surveying all, they have failed because everything has become dangerous; if complete surveillance was a means to ensure hope against fear, then those same invasions – the fear-inducing perversions that senseless violence can cause – have become commonplace; and if it was avoid the sacrifice of liberty in the hopes of security, then they have lost both.
For no matter what is said, the terrorists won when we became them.
My friends shrug indifferently at these revelations. They say they aren’t doing anything wrong so they need not worry. But I don’t think so. To be guilty before being considered innocent is a slippery slope. Besides not knowing a concrete definition of terrorism or the certain key words that will result in flagging and further government scrutiny, I think back to my mother’s nuance and my crayon-scribbled glass house and I am reminded that the moment you open the window to the world, you’ll catch a cold.
No matter the amount of light that shines, you’ll no longer be private, you’ll no longer be yourself, and one day – maybe after you’ve been scrutinized, judged, and deemed a threat, and it’s cloudy and rainy and thunder is on the way – you’ll pray for blinds.
Many students discovered on Monday that some of their private messages were made public.
Social media circles were shaken on Monday as private messages on Facebook sent between 2007 and 2009 were mysteriously appearing on users’ public timelines.
The website, is denying all instances of the leak, explaining that many users are mistaken and are confusing older public messages for private messages.
Numerous students are reporting otherwise.
Philip Savage, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at McMaster University and researcher of communication law and policy, says that Canada has safeguards in place to combat digital privacy breaches.
“[There] is legislation in Canada to protect your rights as an individual in matters of privacy. PIPEDA sets out rules around the obligations of any government of commercial enterprise around collecting and sharing information on people,” said Savage.
PIPEDA, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, explicitly outlines the rules surrounding the collection and distribution of personal, private information.
Section 4.7.1 states that an organization’s “security safeguards shall protect personal information against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. Organizations shall protect personal information regardless of the format in which it is held.”
“You cannot have your private correspondence shared, regardless of the Terms of Service that you may have signed,” said Savage in reference to clause 16.3 in the Facebook terms of service.
The terms state, in part, “We do not guarantee that Facebook will always be safe, secure or error-free or that Facebook will always function without disruptions, delays or imperfections.”
An organization’s terms of service, accepted or otherwise, cannot supersede Canadian regulations as long as they operate within the country.
The personal information act does not differentiate between breaches of information as both technical fouls and ethical missteps, and clearly outlines that “an organization may collect, use or disclose personal information only for purposes that a reasonable person would consider are appropriate in the circumstances,” which would be employed, for example, in the case of releasing to police officers relevant information in a criminal investigation or about people who are at risk for suicide and abuse.
This is not the first breach of privacy in Facebook’s recent history, as the social media icon was involved in a lengthy investigation in May 2008 regarding “22 separate violations of PIPEDA,” surrounding the collection and disclosure of information on the site. The accusation was brought forward by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, CIPPIC, an organization spawned of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.
Leslie Regan Shade, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, provided her insights into a history rife with legal issues. “Facebook has always played a cat and mouse game with privacy laws and data commissioners. CIPPIC found that many of the issues that were brought to Facebook’s attention were resolved, and it set a global precedent for Facebook,” said Shade. While the issues were resolved within the one-year time limit set by the Assistant Privacy Commissioner, CIPPIC continued to have concerns with the default settings for users not being reflective of the intent behind the initial resolution.
“If you do not file a complaint, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner may not begin an official investigation in the near future,” said Shade.
Even more recently, Facebook underwent intense scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. on their propensity to reveal private information that users were told would be kept private. The resulting case was settled on the premise that Facebook would undergo regular auditing every two years for the next twenty years as a countermeasure to their quickly shifting privacy atmosphere.
“I think whenever you have huge amounts of information gathered, that there will be mishaps,” said Savage. It is an organizations’ responsibility to have both technical protection in place and accountable individuals available when such a privacy breach is discovered, as outlined by PIPEDA.
Savage believes that this is an issue that needs to be investigated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, headed by Jennifer Stoddard, the Commissioner herself.
“The Office has been proactive in investigating breaches of privacy in the past, such as the photo tagging issue on Facebook where users were being tagged without their prior consent,” he said.
He then added that the Office was also instrumental in changing Google’s policy in their maps application to include the distortion of faces and sensitive addresses such as women’s shelters.
A statement released by the privacy commissioner’s office on Tuesday elaborated the minister’s current investigation into privacy leaks by popular websites. Research conducted by the office found that “approximately one in four of the sites tested,” had “significant privacy concerns.”
Stoddard has contacted eleven unnamed organizations to inquire into their privacy practices and work with them to ascertain their compliance with PIPEDA and related laws.
“It is time for a more considered, government-driven inquiry into protecting privacy. The means by which PIPEDA and other privacy safeguards are enforced are not resourced enough,” said Savage.
In the meantime, Savage urges students to read the nature of their agreements with organizations, and complain to their service providers if they feel their privacy has been violated.
