Did the scholars at NYU forget why the US receded from Britain? It seems NYU has gone to extreme measures to ensure the safety of its students. While there’s an easy and obvious solution to the situation, the school now requires all students to register their cell phone numbers in order to register for classes.

What if a student refuses to surrender his cell number? The undergrad can’t register for classes when Fall registration begins in April, says Nicholas Deleon — an NYU student and CrunchGear blogger.

It seems NYU plans to use SMS to communicate with students if necessary. From the NYU site:

The University has developed the capacity to send text messages to your cell phone when Public Safety needs to send an alert message. This system will ensure you get timely information and significantly enhance your personal safety.

At Blorge, we aren’t ready to shutdown everything that invades our privacy. We understand sometimes it’s necessary to expose certain details of our lives to certain organizations, but we can’t imagine why this is necessary. Should an emergency occurr, what’s the difference between a mass SMS and an intercom system? And if NYU needs to communicate with an invidual student in an emergency situation, what’s wrong with calling for the student’s name over the intercom?

Not many colleges have intercom systems (this blogger’s school doesn’t), but if an emergency intercom system can be built instead of forcing students to hand over their numbers, why not? It would be a much different situation if it was voluntary — perhaps that’s the true solution to this problem. We’re sure many students would comply if the benefits of doing so were explained (posters, flyers, handouts), but requiring this in order to register for classes is excessive and unnecessary.

Maybe it’s time for the US government to start protecting our rights instead of passing laws that allow for ways to invade it. The whole point of creating this country was to protect our rights in the first place anyway!

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Entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 8:14 pm under Cell phones, Technology.

Read more entries by Danny Mendez.
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