Satire: UNC’s very own season of Big Brother begins

Welcome back to campus, students!

It has been our pleasure to watch you over the past few weeks. It warms our hearts to see friends reconnect, new students learn the layout of campus and just about everything else in between.

We are the 10-foot-high cameras positioned all over Polk Place. Last semester, after campus leadership instructed the police to attack and arrest its own students, they also made sure to install us all around the Quad, and it seems we’re here to stay! 

Look up the next time you’re passing Dey Hall — you just might see us. 

With this heightened surveillance, we have found so many more ways to connect with our students. We love the increased access we now have to your everyday lives. Just imagine the next protest on campus — we’ll be right there with you guys, taking bird's-eye view pictures and documenting your faces. Who knows what we could do with all that information?

If you think about it, we’re really just the cherry on top in a long history of this school monitoring its students' activities. 

In 2016, UNC signed a one-year contract with Social Sentinel, now part of Navigate 360, a company that offers technology capable of scanning students' social media accounts for the purpose of identifying students who pose a risk to themselves or others. 

Instead of just using Social Sentinel to prevent threats to campus safety, campus administration ultimately began using it as a way to track and monitor students during protests. In 2017, following an email from an FBI agent to the chief of UNC Police, UNC officials utilized that very software to collect information on students protesting against Silent Sam, a since-toppled statue of a Confederate soldier. 

The ability to identify entire groups of people and associate them with an event or location is such a beautiful byproduct of technology like that from Social Sentinel. While UNC’s contract with Social Sentinel ended in 2019, we really have no idea what other forms of surveillance the school employs on its students. 

Don’t worry, though. Our surveillance doesn’t stop in Polk Place. In fact, an in-class camera at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, a good buddy of ours, was recently used to record a professor without his knowledge.

Larry Chavis was a clinical professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Kenan-Flagler for 18 years, right up until last semester. He announced on LinkedIn this spring that he was notified by the school in April that they had secretly recorded and reviewed several of his classes. His contract for the following year was not renewed. 

We are so proud of our friend, the Panopto camera that recorded his lectures, for participating in such unwitting surveillance.

Public surveillance has oftentimes been critiqued for its invasion of people’s privacy, but we just don’t understand the controversy. What could possibly go wrong from the University tracking its students' every move? In fact, the core reason for all our surveillance is just to keep everybody safe. If it makes you more comfortable, you could always just think of us as something like a Big Brother, just trying to keep you out of trouble. 

Seriously, don’t you want to be kept safe? Never mind that in 2020, former UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz himself said that he was unaware of any instance where services like Social Sentinel had genuinely prevented violence. 

Maybe heightened surveillance doesn’t necessarily keep you safe, but doesn’t the illusion of safety feel better? Not only are we watching somewhere as public as the Quad, we’re also in your classrooms, recording and listening to everything you say. 

We have to give UNC credit for all of this. Without them, maybe your tuition money would be spent on increasing housekeeper pay or advancing accessibility measures. Who wants that? 

We’d say goodbye, but that just wouldn’t make sense. We’re still right here with you on campus. So always remember to smile! Because you’re on camera.

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com