Protecting Data Security on Campus | Avast

Protecting Data Security on Campus | Avast
David Strom, 18 September 2020

Here's how college students can keep their data security protected as they attempt to return to campus



As college students try to return to campus, some are being asked to allow the college unprecedented access to their whereabouts and health information, as we posted last week. Many are learning about the personal implications of their data security for the first time, let alone dealing with being quarantined
When the first wave of the pandemic was happening earlier this year, we wrote about contact tracing apps and highlighted the potentially invasive access to your personal information, location and contacts. But these apps are now being used in many places. I’ve previously explored the wide ranging methods colleges are using to try to bring students back to campus safely and how they are planning to track their students (and staff). In that post, I cite the story about Albion College in Michigan which contracted with a developer to build their own tracking app that had several rookie security coding bugs.
It may not be reasonable to expect students to debug their tracking apps, but this is what happened at Albion.  One of the bugs was discovered by a computer science student at the college who stepped through the code. Good for her, but still most of us shouldn’t have to do this. We should trust the college IT managers to do their jobs. That c ..

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