Ah, sorry, I didn't mean to take a conspiratorial tone.

On campus, a LOT of students (perhaps the less technically adept ones) found it very surprising that Brown claimed to know where students were. This post was aimed primarily at those students, to clarify the technical mechanisms by which Brown located students.

I tried to speculate as little as possible. The rough set of indicators Brown took is straight from the University Spokesperson — I'm mostly just trying to fill in the technical details.

As for which of these mechanisms Brown is using most, the word on campus points mostly to IP geolocation.

maybe "How Brown University might know when you are on campus"

Brown University is conducting surveillance on its students. Everyone knew it was technically feasible, even trivial, but now that there is a financial incentive to surveil, it’s happening and impacting students.

I think that’s the reason for the tone.

I recall at one university there was a student who was clever enough to hack the card access system, but dumb enough to impersonate the university president and swipe into a main gate in the wee hours of the morning.

"Back in my day" we just set up card skimmers in the places that tended to attract the most law enforcement attention. Nobody blinks twice when "campus PD carded into X at 1:44AM" shows up in the logs. We also exploited the dining hall unlimited meals (if you pay a stupid amount, supposedly limited to only the individual who paid) program to the benefit of several dozen people (and there was at least one frat doing the same in parallel). We were smart but not geniuses. I'm sure that there's thousands of college students out there exploiting the various ineptitude of colleges. Colleges have a very adversarial relationship with their undergrads so it's no surprise.

Wisdom vs Intellect right there.

They bring together information from different sources, which should raise eyebrows.