From Hinman Box addresses to birthdays, home telephone numbers to BlitzMail names, information about Dartmouth students can be found easily and is available to anyone.
Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the College can and does release information considered directory information without any restrictions or consent.
Information considered directory information includes a student's name, age, dates of enrollment and residence, major, degrees awarded, awards and honors, campus addresses and telephone numbers, date and place of birth, relationships to alumni, most recent school previously attended, extracurricular activities, weight and height of athletes and other similar information.
People from both the Dartmouth community and from outside the College can access directory information by calling the Office of the Registrar or the Dean of the College's office.
Generally, the College freely distributes directory information, but in questionable situations, it is at the discretion of the Dean of the College, Acting Associate Dean of the College Katherine Burke said.
"We routinely [release information] if it's directory information, but if there were a question, we could decline to do so," Burke said.
Students may request to withhold all of their personal information, but must request such a measure in writing to the Office of the Dean of the College.
Students are informed of how to keep their information private in a letter sent to first year students before matriculation.
Access to students' actual educational records such as grades and Grade Point Averages is restricted to faculty and administrators with a "legitimate educational interest" in the record, government agencies entitled access by law, a student's parent or guardian if the student is financially dependent and other organizations with a legal right to the information.
"Students have a legitimate interest in the privacy of their educational records," Burke said.
However, non-academic information is available to the general public through many different sources.
Directory information from the Dartmouth Name Directory is available on the Web and in both Mugshots and the Green Book. All three areas have warnings against using the information available for commercial purposes, but it is difficult to regulate this use.
In past years these publications have been used to create mailing lists of students. Some students complained last year about receiving unsolicited letters in their HB's.
"The presumption was that someone had taken the mailing addresses from the Green Book," Dean of First Year Students Peter Goldsmith said.
One of the ways that the use of these publications is monitored is through a fictional entry in the Green Book. Although the person does not have a BlitzMail account, it is used to monitor any unwanted paper mail using a Dartmouth employee's home address and an administrative HB.
"Some people have imagined that the purpose of that dummy entry was somehow to entrap students, but the reality is that the dummy entry is intended to entrap outside commercial sources that use the Green Book information," Goldsmith said.
Information displayed in the Dartmouth Interactive Directory is relatively secure because access to it is regulated through K Client, which requires a DND name and password.
"We're working hard to let people know that they should treat their DND name and password very carefully," said Rich Brown, Manager of Special Projects in Kiewit Computer Center.
Another problem some students encounter is unsolicited e-mails littering their in boxes, from both on and off campus.
"It's increasingly frequent that students receive unwanted e-mail from strangers," Goldsmith said.
It is possible for anyone with a student's name to send the student email, but more often it is the student who unintentionally discloses the information.
According to Brown, student e-mail address can be found using programs that scan web pages or discussion groups for email addresses and then record them.
Brown said Computing Services receives about one call per week from a student trying to stop unwanted e-mail. He said the emails range from get rich quick schemes to advertisements for sexually explicit web sites.
Brown said it was unlikely that someone within or outside the college could obtain a list of all people with BlitzMail accounts for a mass e-mailing. Access to full user lists are restricted to select individuals in Computing Services.
