Student reports privacy issues in software. They accuse you of violating copyright

Report privacy issues

Proctorius es a software company that markets a platform that ensures students don't cheat on distance exams. It is a tool used by many academic institutions in the United States, including the University of Miami. ANDThis university is attended by a student named Erik Johnson who discovered several privacy issues and decided to comment on them on Twitter.

Smile. We are watching you

As a result of the Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation decreed in many countries in response to Covid-19, many institutions had to go out and improvise solutions that would allow them to continue operating. And while remote surveillance software already existed, its sales soared. when the number of students who had to take exams and tests from home increased exponentially. Educational institutions decided to rely on monitoring software to avoid evaluations.

Students have to install the proctoring software of their school or university choosing by granting the exam administrator important access to their computer including your webcams and microphones, to monitor your activity and detect potential cheating.

Report privacy issues and are accused of copyright infringement

As if I did not have enough questions for the alleged lack of impartiality when applying the terms and conditions, Twitter sent Erik an email announcing that three of those tweets had been removed from his account in response to a request from Proctorio. filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

According to Wikipedia:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) treaties.
This law sanctions not only the infringement of the reproduction rights itself, but also the production and distribution of technologies that allow bypassing the copyright protection measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM for its acronym in English) . It also increases the penalties for copyright infringements on the Internet.

Johnson was able to analyze the extensions that students have to install in the Chrome browser and published his findings. In the questioned tweets, he described under what circumstances the platform would cancel a student's exam if it detected signs of possible cheating.For example changing the Internet provider, making suspicious eye movements or abnormal clicks. He also included links to code snippets that he uploaded to Pastebin.

Proctorio has already received several questions about its platform due to the demand of certain software requirements and, because the facial recognition software does not detect the darker skin tones And, he doesn't seem to like criticism very much

About us filed a lawsuit against the security investigator Ian Linkletter, a learning technology specialist at the University of British Columbia, after he criticized the company's software on Twitter.

Consulted by the press, the response of the firm through its public relations company was:

Mr. Johnson's claim that he has the right to reproduce the code because he was able to download it is simply not true. Regardless of your ability to download the files, they are still protected by the Copyright Law. Also, if Mr. Johnson had looked at the files he downloaded, he would have seen the multiple copyright notices in the header of each file that expressly state that the code is the property of Proctorio »

For its part, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation stated:

This is actually a fair use textbook example. What Erik did, posting excerpts from Proctorio's code that showed the characteristics of the software he was criticizing, is no different from citing a book in a review. The fact that it is code rather than literature does not make the use any less fair. "

Before the intervention of EFF, Twitter that seems to pay attention to whoever pushes it the hardest, decided restore tweets with the excuse that the copyright infringement claim was not complete.


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  1.   Eduardo said

    Well because of twitter now it turns out that it is easier to censor than to do things well ... the way and resources used by these companies are increasingly questionable.