Higher education institutions are mining and analyzing student data to effect educational, political, and managerial outcomes. Done under the banner of “learning analytics,” this work can—and often does—surface sensitive data and information about, inter alia, a student's demographics, academic performance, offline and online movements, physical fitness, mental wellbeing, and social network. With these data, institutions and third parties are able to describe student life, predict future behaviors, and intervene to address academic or other barriers to student success (however defined). Learning analytics, consequently, raise serious issues concerning student privacy, autonomy, and the appropriate flow of student data. We argue that issues around privacy lead to valid questions about the degree to which students should trust their institution to use learning analytics data and other artifacts (algorithms, predictive scores) with their interests in mind. We argue that higher education institutions are paradigms of information fiduciaries. As such, colleges and universities have a special responsibility to their students. In this article, we use the information fiduciary concept to analyze cases when learning analytics violate an institution's responsibility to its students.

Digital archives are a popular way for archivists to provide access to their important collections, but they also create more opportunities for private information within these collections to be disseminated widely and without consent. This is especially true of collections of the recent past, which often include materials and testimonies from living individuals. This paper draws on interview data collected from 13 archivists at four institutions that created digital archives of Civil Rights Movement-era materials. Despite clear professional obligations to protect individual privacy, the author found that archivists relied on open-access policies to justify their projects and digitisation labour itself.