In his essay, Michael Morris states that through mining student data, threat-assessment teams of universities have a great chance and plausible accuracy to predict possible violent behaviors with mining algorithms. As a result, it is responsible for every university to monitor students’ academic record and prevent every possible tragedy.
Undoubtedly, in no way are we supposed to turn blind eyes to the fact that as the development of statistics and computer science, the mining algorithms is remarkable in this Internet era. Like the way Amazon know what productions we are interested in and may purchase and recommend them in our app, threat-assessment teams are probably detected most of possible violent behaviors before they come true. So mining student data can be a effective way to prevent those terrible issues like suicide or criminal behaviors.
However, the accuracy of the mining algorithms is not 100 percent, or even far less than 100 percent. As Micheal Morris said in his essay, I have had my credit-card transaction declined for many times since I created in China but lived in America now. The bank monitored my transaction record and defined it as an unusual pattern of spending America dollars with my credit card. My life was heavily infected during the time my card was freezing. The protection that bank provided actually based on the inaccurate result of the mining algorithm and it took the unnecessary action. The same as my bank, Amazon usually makes inaccurate prediction and recommendation as well, that’s why our app often shows productions unrelated to our interests.
Similarly, the mining algorithms can lead threat-assessment teams to wrong direction and judge some nonviolent academic record as possible threat to campus safety. If a university take action according to that prediction and ask an innocent student to have a conversation, that will definitely affect the student’s daily life. The feeling of being monitored and offended will come to the student and prevent them from concentrating on their career. In that case, the university just invade the student’s life let alone by a way that even though the university does not take any action, it has already pried the student’s privacy.
Under the situation that the algorithm can not reach 100 percent accuracy, universities which use the data-mining technology may invaded normal students’ daily life. As a result, I disagree with the statement of Micheal Morris and consider that it is not time for universities to abuse the data-mining technology.
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