I kind of doubt it. You, as a 18-22 year old college student, would leave your friends, girlfriend/boyfriend, and everything else because of this? More likely, you and your friends would instead just bitch about it and call the admins nazis while getting drunk.

This is the correct answer. They technically capable students might try to somehow undermine this as well. That's the extent.

Unfortunately, this is standard practice across schools (and most big employers). This is definitely not a problem unique to Brown, or even elite schools.

There was a scandal back in 2010 where a high school in Philadelphia was accused of spying on kids through school-issued laptop webcams [1], which is arguably more egregious.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-s...

Are you sure other schools are not doing the same, or won't in the very near future?

Aside from camera use, because my team does not support that system, my team helped our university admin do the same things. In fact you could really just find/replace "Brown" with our name and this would be the same write-up. Lots of American schools run this same infra and did the same things.

As someone who went to multiple schools for undergrad including brown I fully disagree. Brown is a very libertarian school with regard to the student body. Sure this example sucks but how many people at brown were involved with this decision making process? This feels like a situation where technical administrators who are not in charge of normal student life made a decision which is both highly unusual and clearly controversial. I would say the main people I came into contact with at brown for instance RAs in dorms and my professors and course staff were absolutely understanding, kind, and liberal in a way that I did not experience in other schools.

They’re all doing it, just at different levels of nanny-state oversight.