Each user of the PAUSD student wireless must accept its user agreement, which defines its terms of use.

– Suzanna Ackroyd

Any student who has used the Student Wireless network provided by the Palo Alto Unified School District has also pressed the “Accept” button following the user agreements outlined by the district. The Information Technology department of PAUSD has been working to consolidate the district’s Internet security policy in an attempt to rectify the inconvenience of this feature due to its necessity after every disconnection with the network.

The department members made clear to what extent they regulate usage; they told The Voice staff what exactly they monitor, what they have the right to monitor, and to what extent students have privacy.

“The clause says we can look at everything, but ususally we just look at generic usage of the network,” District Director of Techonology Ann Dunkin said. “If there’s a problem we have the right to monitor traffic and look at individual user accounts.”

Dunkin made clear that while she and her department members have the right to view student activity, they will not unless activity that violates the agreement is detected.

“Essentially you have no privacy at school, but we’re not interested in looking at your data,” Dunkin continued. “We’re too busy to mess with that. But we have the right. We could identify an issue and initiate the investigation, but would contact the administration before reviewing student data. We would only look if the administration asked us to.”

She said that, besides lacking the resources to monitor student activity very closely, Dunkin believes in a different philosophy.

“We filter the absolute minimum content the law requires [and] we try and block the absolute minimum [because] we think its more important for students to learn to make good choices than [for us] to restrict,” Dunkin said. “You’re going to college in a couple years and there won’t be anyone looking over your shoulder. We only look at … that stuff in a very generic fashion. We are not interested in being big brother.  We are really not interested in being front page news.”

One of the major issues Paly students have had with the free Wi-Fi network introduced last year, is the requirement to accept the district’s terms and conditions every time a personal device is disconnected from the network. However, this policy is no longer in effect, according to Dunkin.

The Voice asked if the district would be considering individual user accounts and passwords on the new system so individuals could sign the agreement and log into the server for longer periods of time. The technology department said it has been working on this issue but has yet to consolidate the two user agreements, the student acceptable use and wireless acceptable use, into one agreement that would allow users to log onto the system for an extended (not yet determined) period of time.

“When we implement the new network you will log on to your own account and you will stay logged on for a period of time, say a day or a week- we still need to pick that number,” Dunkin said. “We could not figure out a way to combine the two policies (student acceptable use and wireless acceptable use) in a way that worked for the district’s attorneys [because] we had to open up registration for new students in late January and we couldn’t make the deadline. So, you’ll have to accept the wireless policy, but we’ll probably capture it once at the beginning of the year. After that, you’ll just log on to wireless with your username and password.”

“We expect to have a new wireless newtwork for Paly students you guys by the time you come back next year, [which will be] probably six times faster than the current [one],” Dunkin added.

I.T. project manager James Kamenelis added that the daily authentication protects students’ network accounts in case of theft.

“[On the new system] you will need to authenticate your device about once a day, [in case] a device gets lost or stolen,” Kamenelis said.

In response to a particular complaint about the inconvenience of the user agreement on the iPhone device, network engineer Alexey Demyankenko affirmed that the new system would fix the current problem.

“Currently it’s actually about the iPhone devices,” Demyankenko  said. “When you enable again it says ‘hello I am here;’ that is why [it is necessary to] go through that process again. The new system will make significant improvements [while maintaining the] same credentials when getting access to the wireless.”