Who's Watching Me?

Bob Blakley’s reflections from the Digital ID World conference

A principal analyst for identity and privacy strategies at the Burton Group, Bob Blakely gave a talk this month at Digital ID World in Santa Clara, CA, titled, “What is Privacy, Really?” Campus Technology asked Blakley to comment on his topic in relation to the higher education community.

Conventionally, people think of privacy in terms of secrecy. They think that privacy means the obligation to protect information that we have observed, maybe in the course of our job, about other people. The point that I made [in my talk] today was that there’s another part of privacy that we don’t speak of so often, which is equally important, or perhaps more important – and that is our obligation not to pry into other peoples’ affairs; to avert our eyes or close our ears if we come across something that is obviously private. And [I spoke about] our obligation as a society to censure people who don’t fulfill that obligation, because that kind of behavior – voyeurism and gossip – is destructive to civil society. I made an argument that there may be a way to construct a right to privacy that d'esn’t currently exist in our constitution on these grounds, if it continues to be the case that lots of private information is exposed...

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The Johns Hopkins University Press: Preservation with Portico

The Johns Hopkins University (MD) is home to one of the largest university presses, which publishes 61 scholarly journals and more than 200 new books each year. The JHU Press has signed an agreement with Portico to preserve its entire collection of journal titles electronically...

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Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report

The security vendor released a 120-page report this week, outlining trends it observed in the first six months of 2006. Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network monitors “millions of antivirus products and thousands of intrusion detection sensors deployed around the globe, as well as data gathered from Symantec antifraud solutions,” according to Executive Editor Dean Turner’s forward...

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A New President for Fast-Growing Northcentral University

Claudia Santin assumed her new role as Northcentral University’s (AZ) president this month, moving from academic vice president, provost, and chief operating officer. She takes the reins as president during a period of expansion – the fully online university experienced a 40 percent growth in the first eight months of 2006, reaching an enrollment of more than 3,600 students...

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