When I went to download Proctorio, an anti-cheating Chrome extension, the first thing that stuck out to me was the overwhelming number of one-star reviews. At first, I thought NC State students had repeated the best practical joke of 2020 — when Wuhan students flooded their online homework app DingTalk with bad reviews to get it taken down from app stores — but the poor reviews raised much more serious concerns about the programs' ethics, privacy policy and data usage.
I thought there was no way I had the right app. I ran a quick Google search and a flurry of damning articles came up in its wake of students,professors and industry pros declaring Proctorio — and other artificial intelligence-powered testing services — a dangerous invasion of privacy.
I was shocked. When this service had so much controversy, why was my professor electing to use it? If there are serious ethical and logistical concerns about a program, why should students be required to use it to participate in our class?
The answer is, of course, we shouldn’t.
For context, Proctorio’s AI records the test-taker during the test and sends video snippets of any suspicious behavior to the instructor. This includes looking off-screen for an extended period, background noise or strange web activity. Even when the recording feature is off, Chrome warns when installing Proctorio that it can also “read and change all your data on all websites,” “capture content of your screen,” “change your privacy-related settings” and more.
Beyond the already eerily Orwellian premise, students and non-students alike are mainly concerned with how Proctorio’s AI collects and uses your personal information. In order for Proctorio to detect things like eye movement, Proctorio’s AI takes measurements of a student’s facial anatomy to recognize any anomalies that may suggest cheating. Proctorio claims it uses facial detection technology to do this; however, a Reddit user found a now-deleted tweet where Proctorio stated it actually uses facial recognition, a process that collects much more data than facial detection.
This may seem harmless enough — after all, we give our phones biometric data every time we use Face ID, but swarms of students belonging to Black, Latinx and other communities have reported Proctorio having trouble recognizing their faces. This caused serious issues and even completely prevented some students from taking their exams. Proctorio claims it has addressed the issue, but facial-recognition AI notoriously struggles to be racially unbiased.
Since the majority of NC State courses are in-person, why should we risk it all? Even if a class is online, professors can utilize NC State’s DELTA testing center to schedule on-campus exams. Why not eliminate the potential struggles and take our tests in person, with a proctor who won’t have any problem recognizing you as a human being?
Additionally, the biometric data Proctorio collects to monitor students’ activity is extremely sensitive. And it may not be safe in their hands. In July 2020, ProctorU, a similar company to Proctorio, suffered a data breach that exposed data from nearly 500,000 students. This data did not include biometric data but did include full names, addresses, passwords and more. Three Illinois students sued ProctorU, alleging the company did not properly protect student data.
ProctorU responded that the security risk was minimal because the data was from 2012. This did little to help its defense. What reason, the opposition asked, did ProctorU have for holding on to students’ data for eight years? Outdated data is still data. There shouldn’t be a time limit for protecting it.
Proctorio may not have had any security leaks yet, but with fellow companies falling to malicious hackers, the risk is not worth the reward. Furthermore, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy-focused research center, submitted a formal complaint to the District of Columbia accusing Proctorio of deceptive trade practices. This means our data may not be vulnerable just to hackers, but to Proctorio itself. We shouldn’t have to worry that videos of our faces, IDs and homes might be stolen or used unethically — not now and certainly not eight years down the line — just so we can get our degree.
It’s understandable that professors would turn to this kind of software to prevent cheaters. It requires minimal effort for them to tackle a large problem. However, the NC State Student Code of Conduct asks students to respect each other’s academic rights and freedom, so it’s only fair that the University respects our right to privacy in return. I’m done sacrificing my liberties to sites like Proctorio. NC State needs to be done with it, too.
