[Important] Need you to intervene on emotional, rational and humanitarian ground

[Anonymous NLUD Alumni]

Dear all 

I am an alumna/alumnus of nlu delhi and I write this email anonymously to bring to your notice certain issues that concern us all.

What is the issue? 

The privacy setting of this google group (nlude...@googlegroups.com) has been kept as “Public” ( screenshot attached). This means that all the conversations ever done so far on this google group are publicly accessible and available on the open internet to anyone and everyone. 

Detailing the issue

• Consider for instance A, a former student of NLUD, during her/his college years engaged on this group on a fiercely contested topic, say “xyz”. Any person on the open internet can find such conversation merely through a google search ( by typing “A nlu Delhi ” in the google search box). 

• Similarly consider another example wherein B, a former student of NLUD who was suffering from mental health issues during her college days, in a depressed state of mind as also to highlight the importance of mental health put up her ordeal detailing the challenges she had been wading through, her mental health issues as also her past experiences with self harming tendencies. Any person on the open internet can find this conversation merely by typing “B nlu Delhi” and thus can know that B had mental health issues and self harming tendencies in the past which can be very debilitating to her personal and professional life as also to her mental health at present.

• Similarly take for instance another example wherein C, a former student of NLUD, during her/his college years engaged in, say, about 25 conversations on this google group. Any person on the open internet can find all such 25 conversations wherein C engaged during her/his college years at one place merely through a google search. This, at the cost of loosely using the term, is also unintentionally resulting in “profiling/data profiling” of the individuals concerned.

This email itself would also be publicly available on the open internet is the reason why I cannot refer to any specific conversation/email thread on this google group in order to explain the issue. Instead I chose to explain using hypothetical examples. Through these hypothetical examples, I merely have tried to explain how this google group's settings set as “public” can be problematic to certain individuals who ever engaged on this group. Please appreciate that while the above examples are hypothetical, it certainly shows a close semblance of the issues and concerns the current setting of the google group being set as “public” is resulting in.

Why this is a concern:

This google group has about 1900 conversations/email threads and all of it is invariably available publicly on the open internet merely through a simple google search. While most of it was in the nature of academic discussions or relating to mundane college affairs, there are a plethora of conversations on this group the nature of which is critical and sensitive. While in most cases this creates merely an ‘avoidable’ digital footprint, in many other cases it creates an uncomfortable, undesirable, and adverse digital footprint that can have a significant adverse bearing on the personal and professional lives of the persons concerned. Moreover, it’s worth appreciating that not all those who ever engaged on this google group ever foresaw that their conversations would go public on the open Internet. It is also pertinent to draw a distinction between a data which can be called “locally public” and a data which is “globally public”. While it can be argued that the persons engaging in conversation on this google group willingly intended to make their emails “locally public” i.e publicly available only to the members of NLUD. But it would be less than suitable to conclude that all those who engaged on this google group willingly intended or foresaw that their conversations/emails would go “globally public”. 

I request all members of this google group reading this email to collectively request (or pass on the message to) the admin/manager/owner of this googlegroup to kindly change the privacy setting to “Private”. If the managers/admin/owner of this group is reading this themselves, please consider doing the needful. 

 

Regards,

Anonymous NLUD Alumni 

PS- 

I wrote this email anonymously because this email itself would also be publicly available on the open internet.