Online Proctoring: Privacy Invasion or Study Alleviation?: Discovering Acceptability Using Contextual Integrity

Abstract

Detecting fraud during online exams using proctoring software comes with substantial privacy challenges. Previous work argues students experience heightened anxiety and have privacy concerns. However, little is known about which specific aspects of online proctoring cause these concerns. This study contributes such insights by using the Contextual Integrity (CI) framework to discover how students (N = 456) rate the acceptability of 1064 proctoring information flows with varying information types, recipients, and transmission principles. We find that the acceptability varies considerably depending on the context. Besides exposing obvious privacy violations, we find that, under certain conditions, students consider it acceptable to share data with teachers - despite their lack of involvement in proctoring. Also, the acceptability of sharing highly sensitive information - which should under no circumstances be shared - sometimes increases. We discuss the implications of these and other findings and provide concrete recommendations for educational institutions using online proctoring.