[Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students]

[Bram Dov Abramson]

It's hard not to wonder whether alternatives to Turnitin are in the offing.

First, you'd think that comparing a given text to all the
publicly-available Web content, journal articles, books, and other things
they're already indexing would be exactly the sort of thing Google, say,
would be good at.

Second, it sounds like some of the opposition to Turnitin has to do with
perceived risks arising from the jurisdiction in which it is based and
operates.  When that happened with cryptographic work, some of the U.S.
efforts migrated north to Canada and elsewhere.  A competitor based
outside the U.S. might have a real

Third, surely delaminated open-source tools which separated the querying
and comparing to the hashing, would provide more options.  If universities
which submit papers to Turnitin also had access to good tools with strong
respect for privacy, for instance, it would not be too difficult for them
to automate the hashing or whatever of the materials they were also
submitting to Turnitin.  By gradually building up their own archives,
they'd be building a resource which would decrease their dependence on
single efforts like Turnitin -- and could create interfaces to enable
privacy-compliant plagiarism queries without giving up control of the
contents or of the ethical standards by which those archives were
governed.

cheers
Bram