While the legislation will not pass until later this year, a number of schools are already looking at high-tech solutions to proctor online exams for them. The most sophisticated of them is the Securexam Remote Proctor, a small device which features a fingerprint scanner, microphone, and a video camera with a 360 degree view. In order to start an exam, students have to prove their identity by fingerprint and during the exam, while the microphone and video look out for anything suspicious like an unknown voice or movement on the camera.

While Securexam advertises its system as promoting 'integrity and convenience,' the device looks to be anything but convenient. It only works on Windows machines and only with Internet Explorer. Given how popular Apple's computers are with students, this clearly creates problems for a large number of students.

The Remote Proctor is currently being tested by Troy University and costs around $150.

Other programs, like Kryterion's Webassessor, use a somewhat simpler solution based on webcams and biometrics. Webassessor users human proctors that watch up to 50 students each and its software analyses a student's typing style and alerts the proctors if there is a change (like when somebody else has taken over).

Challenge Questions

Axicom Corporation, which is being used by quite a few universities for their online courses, uses personal 'challenge' questions to establish the identity of a student. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, these questions are based on data Axicom gathers from publicly available databases such as criminal files and property records (surely, nobody would want their friends to have to answer a challenge question about whether they were first arrested for arson in 1995 or 1997).

Privacy

All of these systems carry a good number of privacy issues with them, but they are also all relatively expensive. Then, of course, there are questions if cheating on online exams is even a real problem. As the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, most teachers in online courses rely less on major exams and more on projects and group work anyway.

Also, no matter what the technological solution is, chances are that an intrepid cheater will always find a way around this system. Should Congress decide to make systems like this mandatory, however, then we will soon see a whole new market open up and surely other companies will come up with more solutions. The question that remains, however, is if there ever really was a problem in the first place.

What is your take on this? Do you have experience with these systems? Do you think online students need to be monitored more closely?

Photo by Flickr user dcjohn.

A recent study in the UK showed that most Britons have a strong desire for the regulation of social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. In fact, 9 out of 10 people said there should be tighter regulation and, according to today's The Guardian, 89% said there should be a set of widely accepted rules to help prevent personal information from being abused.

Sir Christopher Meyer, the PCC chairman, warned of the dangers of posting content online to these sites, saying, "there is a need for public awareness about what can happen to information once it is voluntarily put into the public domain." In other words, people are posting content without thinking about the consequences and permanence of their actions.

EU Considers Regulation, Too

This news about the British survey comes at the same time as the EU is considering additional social network legislation and regulation as well. The Executive Director of Europe's top Internet security agency, ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency), Andreas Pirotti, recently called for expanding EU legislation "to cover the taking of photos of people and posting them on the Internet," noting that there's no need to obtain consent before posting photos of others.

He also said there's a crucial need to educate people on how social networks work, claiming that most don't understand how the "friending" process works or how it's nearly impossible to erase material once it's online.

But is there really a need for regulation or is this just a scare tactic to help pave the way for ENISA's current power grab? ENISA was created in 2004 as a temporary body to oversee security measures in the EU for a duration of five years. Now, the European Commission wants to extend that  to 2011 and is even considering a controversial proposal to merge them with an EU-wide telecom regulator.

Is U.S. Next?

It's not as if the U.S. hasn't considered social network regulation before, although here it often focuses on the safety of children. We have the controversial "Deleting Online Predators Act," (DOPA) and, around the same time that DOPA was introduced in 2006, Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, proposed legislation that would "require Internet service providers to retain activity logs to aid in criminal investigations, including ones involving child abuse." She then expanded that to include social networks as well. Our current presidential candidate John McCain has also drafted legislation in the past that would require web sites offering user profiles (i.e. social networks) to delete user profile pages posted by sex offenders.

Possible Consequences of Regulation

Despite what may be good intentions on the part of legislators, having government and/or regulatory bodies get involved with how social networks operate could be a very slippery slope, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Once you start demanding social networks comply with certain rules and restrictions instead of just being governed by their own TOS, you're literally impacting an entire industry. There's more to social networks than just MySpace and Facebook. What about smaller networks like those provided by Ning, for example? What about social networks that are used in business like CollectiveX? And if legislation is crafted to control this particular industry, when does that stop?

Another side effect of regulation and "raised awareness" could also be a change in behavior. In the PCC survey, 78% said they would change the information they put online if they thought it would be reproduced by mainstream media. Another recent survey of Germans shows the social effects of surveillance - since the beginning of 2008, communication providers are required to record electronic communication - who communicated with whom, but not what was said. This data is stored for six months so that it could be made available to law enforcement in case of a crime. The problem with this is that the knowledge that communication is recorded has begun to change behavior - 11% of the people surveyed have already abstained from using phones, cell phones or email in certain occasions, especially in private matters like when contacting drug counselors, psychotherapists, or marriage counselors because of this data retention.

This psychological effect could easily impact today's social networks as well if users truly understood how their content could be accessed, stored, saved, and shared with others. Many people believe they have control over the items they post online, but, yesterday, we were all reminded yet again that "your privacy is an illusion," when a Yahoo hack opened up Paris and Lindsey's MySpace photos to the world. If all social networkers became educated as to what it means to post content online, would the social networks suffer a drought of content?

Do you agree that social networks in your country should be regulated? Let us know in the comments.