Back to School Surveillance: “If you’re not where you want to be at the expected time, campus police will show up.”

It’s back to school season and with increasing

concern about sexual crimes on university campuses, there’s a
lot of buzz around a new smartphone application that’s being rolled
at
about 100 schools and allows police (and others) to monitor
students’ movement in real-time and access a lot of personal
information.

It’s called the Rave Guardian Campus Safety App, from Rave
Mobile Safety. Enrollment is voluntary. The company explains its
product:

Students can identify friends, roommates, and family as
‘Guardians’ along with Campus Safety. Students can set a Rave
Guardian Timer. During a Timer session Guardians and Campus Safety
can check status of student. If the Rave Guardian timer is not
deactivated before it expires, campus safety is automatically
provided with the user’s Rave Guardian profile to proactively
identify and check-in on the individual.

Whenever students, faculty, or staff connect with campus safety
from their mobile phone, the Rave Guardian Campus Safety App
automatically delivers a complete caller profile – including
current location, medical conditions, course schedule, addresses,
campus ID photo and other critical data.

Put more
bluntly, “If you’re not where you want to be at the expected
time, campus police will show up,” says Col. Emil Fioravanti, the
campus director of public safety at University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth, which is one of the schools that is adopting the
technology.

Todd Piett, chief product officer of Rave,
tells The Boston Globe, “There’s a growing realization
that safety is a community effort. It’s no longer just about police
keeping people safe; it’s about having a network of people you can
trust helping to keep you safe.”

But, to be sure, cops do like it. Some testimonials
from Rave’s website:

“It’s like blanketing our entire campus and the whole DC area
with a virtual campus blue light phone. Brilliant!” – Michael
McNair, Chief of Police,  American University

“Rave Guardian was actively embraced, campus police are big fans
of it. What we really like about Rave Guardian is that it works on
any cell phone and is a really easy system to use.” – Brian Payst,
Director of Information Technology, University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

Tools to help individuals nip
crime in the bud are exciting; there’s a lot of potential good
to come from this app. At the same time, we do not know what
potential negative, unintended consequences can emerge. There’s
good reason to be wary of surveillance tools that enable police, or
anyone, access to one’s movement and a slew of other sensitive
data.

Police are quick to embrace new methods of monitoring, from

surveillance drones to access to private security cameras to

license plate readers. These have
a lot of
potential for
abuse for crimes like stalking committed by officers,
though. And American Civil Liberties Union has warned about the
need for individual citizens to consider how much surveillance
power cops ought to have so that we may still “enjoy the benefits
of this new technology without bringing us closer to a
‘surveillance society’ in which our every move is monitored,
tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by the government.”