Your pri­vacy

Be care­ful about online iden­tity, and keep a dis­tinc­tion between things that are pub­lic and pri­vate, work-related and friend-only appro­pri­ate. When you leave Prince­ton, you are going to lose the abil­ity to edit things you posted in a course blog. You might have very dif­fer­ent opin­ions twenty years from now then you did when you were a Prince­ton student.

Although you log into the Word­Press blogs at Prince­ton using your LDAP cre­den­tials, you need not dis­play your real name to read­ers of your blog. Your Word­Press pro­file (under your name in the top grey bar when you are logged into Word­Press) con­tains a field called “nick­name.” This will be the author name that is dis­played on posts and pages that you write. You can use any alias you want, or use your real name.

FERPA stands for “Fam­ily Edu­ca­tion Rights to Pri­vacy Act.” It requires edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions to pro­tect the pri­vacy of stu­dents. Class­room dis­cus­sions are meant to be pri­vate. Because of this, we try not to make it obvi­ous who is enrolled in a spe­cific course dur­ing a semes­ter. You are not obliged to reveal your iden­tity and should not ever explic­itly reveal the iden­tity of oth­ers in your class. Reveal­ing your own iden­tity is your decision.