While the credit card data leakage crisis concerned mostly the average Korean taxpayer, college students, fledgling members of the domestic economy, are also at risk. College students are at risk of compromising their financial information, since many universities require student identification (ID) cards to be registered in conjunction with a bank account, increasing the risk of data leakage. Also, as the forerunners of adapting to the rapid changes in the information technology (IT) industry, college students have indulged themselves in a wide variety of social networking services (SNS), and in doing so, have irrecoverably exposed themselves to potential invasion of privacy. Furthermore, some colleges in the United States (US) are considering the possibility of utilizing data mining techniques to satisfy a variety of tasks, such as improving campus security and providing a comprehensive academic system, at the expense of compromising student privacy.

 

The most recent example of privacy invasion on a campus-wide scale occurred earlier this year, when students’ personal financial information was compromised at Seoul National University. University policy required students to synchronize their student card with a Nonghyup bank account. Nonghyup, a firm which was hacked earlier this year, resulted in the exposure of 35,000 sets of private financial data. The university in question has since been developing a student card installed on a mobile platform - one that offers more advanced security features than its physical counterpart. Furthermore, upon consideration of student opinions, the university plans to abolish the mandatory simultaneous registration to potentially unsafe bank accounts.

 

IT experts commonly state that the principal venue of privacy invasion for college students is through SNS. On August 2013, JobKorea published a survey related to SNS usage of college students. Out of the 91% of students that used at least one SNS – three being the average number of SNS used per student – 61% reported that they have felt stressed from SNS usage, mostly due to privacy concerns. For example, coupled with increasing cases of identity theft, the number of college students actively using Facebook has declined by 60% during the past year. Overall, college students have become increasingly aware of the privacy concerns with respect to SNS over the past few years, and have thus moved to closed-type SNS, such as Naver Band.

 

Student privacy is also on the verge of being compromised in other countries, namely the US, which has only just recently undergone an embarrassing surveillance scandal. Lieutenant Michael Morris of the University Police at California State University Channel Islands considered the possibility of employing data mining techniques to scrutinize students’ online activities to strengthen campus security. Many college students are provided with a university e-mail address, access to the intra-campus network, and the Internet. As most of these resources are devoted to academics, research, and communications, university officials can easily collect a student’s profile of online activities, and analyze his or her online behavior through a comprehensive algorithm to predict whether he or she is a potential threat to the rest of the school.

 

Despite the fact that the police officer’s proposal was vehemently chastised by critics due to its controversial methodology in preventing crime, data mining has been employed on an experimental scale in online courses from Arizona State University, the largest public university in the US. Arizona State University’s academic system is fully integrated with a comprehensive data mining system. Its intended purpose is to analyze students’ performance and class behavior, and advise them on future academic endeavors. The system provides a wide range of notifications, from suggesting which courses students should take next semester to “flagging” students, should they perform under expectations. This system, which is rated at 70% accuracy, has also come under great scrutiny for forcing students to surrender privacy in exchange for a somewhat functioning yet fully invasive academic management system.