[RANDOM] Northeastern students in a fishbowl

In my "Computers in Society" class, we talked about the effects of technology on our privacy, and what privacy really means. Privacy is hardly binary (private or public). There are varying degrees of privacy and many of them are based off of perception.

For example, donating money to a political campaign is a public act. For a variety of reasons it's important that donors give out their personal information. Most everyone seems to think that there's nothing wrong with that.

However, if you combine technology with "public" information you can get some controversy over ease of access. For example, California successfully passed a law to ban gay marriage. This website lists every single donor to that campaign by their name, profession, donation amount and marks their exact location on a Google map.

Is this illegal? Technically, no. All of that information is freely and publicly available at government institutions. Why is this a big deal? Most people don't have the energy to copy down thousands of names by hand from record books and post them on the internet on a map.

That's a great example of how people are fine with releasing information to the "public" as long as it's not in everyone's faces. It's analogous to permitting photos of your child's dance performance to go up in a public school's lobby, but making a fuss if they end up on the internet and gather millions of views.

Anyway, this leads up to the fun part of this article, which is how you, whoever you are, can watch Northeastern students online. For free. Really!

There are a number of cameras placed around campus that let you see public areas in real time.

The link is here.

Another student at Northeastern, Will Nowak, compiled all the videos together onto a single page for ease of use.

Is this too far, or perfectly OK? Enjoy the videos.