November 22, 2004

I was astonished when I started reading about some of the things that happend to this kid, like someone taking his blood against his will. I assumed stuff like this would only happen at his ultra-religious christian college, but invasion of privacy is apparently a larger problem in academia.
posted by entertainer 20 years ago
  • This is a good overview on the law when it comes to Christian schools, for anyone overly interested in the law like me :-)
  • Not necessarily Christian-specific, but the University of Oklahoma used social security numbers as student ID's as recently as 2001. My wife was going to school there and it wasn't easy for her to get them to assign a random number. Funny how that policy never made any stink, but what can you say -- it was an Okie school.
  • Yeah -- now, with FERPA, schools aren't supposed to post grades with any identifiable information ... even student IDs...
  • The University of Iowa used SSNs until last year. Case Western Reserve University used them at least through 1998. Iowa driver's licenses used to have them on the front of the license by default (it was easy enough to use a different number, though) until a few years ago. No one's ever taken my blood without my permission, though.
  • Iowa State University ID#s are not SSNs, but SSNs are still in the system and can be used for web access to pay bills and whatnot. I just renewed my driver's license and, in my naivete, was a little surprised that they assigned me a non SSN number for my driver's license. I guess I never worried about SSN privacy since at ISU I pretty much would give it out to just about everyone that needed it. I've been conditioned to not think of it as sensitive information. Too late to hide it now--it's out there. Get to thievin' my identity!
  • When I worked as a highly-trained dorm front desk guy at U. of Maryland in 1994, I had a binder with the SS# of every student who lived on campus- including some people who are now very wealthy pro athletes.
  • Is there a way to navigate that site in chronological order? It's a little hard for me to figure out what exactly happened.
  • He hasn't seemed to post things in chronological order, just random things that occurred in his time on campus that he writes about as he sees fit. The posts, as I see them, are meant to stand on their own.