Rutgers' online course tracks your knuckles, face, browser history

Clive Thompson 11:19 am Tue Mar 10, 2015

Welcome to online learning at Rutgers!

To make sure the person taking the test is actually you, they'll be tracking your "face, knuckle and personal identification details", including "all activity in the monitor, browser, webcam and microphone", according to The Daily Targum. (Thanks to Evan for this, and m01129's CC-2.0-licensed picture here.)

As the Targum goes on to note:

Rutgers University’s new program also uses a “behavior observation tool,” which monitors student browser activity throughout an active session. While this feature is intended to prevent students from using the Internet to cheat on exams, the power that this grants instructors is extremely invasive. If a student accidentally leaves a personal or embarrassing website in their browser during an online course, a ProctorTrack instructor might stumble upon their activity. Monitoring student browser history is extremely invasive and might not be common knowledge to many students utilizing the ProctorTrack software.

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