MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns

[admin]

"The Motion Picture Association of America last month sent letters to the presidents of 25 major universities (pdf), urging them to download and install a 'university toolkit' to help identify students who were downloading/sharing movie files.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/150232

[doctorhardware]

That is a blatant invasion of privacy, but you have to consider who the source is.

[drfsupercenter]

Can't the students just hack the software so they can download stuff unmonitored? If the college I go to ever has that, I'm simply not installing it...

[Chewy]

I can see it installed on their servers not student's computers as the anonymous author/source implies.

[drfsupercenter]

Isn't it the same principal of "they block [such and such site] here so I'm using a proxy"?

[admin]

These tools will probably monitor traffic, see which files students are downloading, and then send the information to the MPAA so they can prosecute (or perhaps persecute) the students in question. Rather than blocking traffic, they are trying to catch people. Then this becomes an issue of privacy, since do you really want your university to know what files you've been downloading and which web pages you've been viewing?

[drfsupercenter]

This will now be a major factor in determining where I go to college