A school mandated that students wear a COVID-detecting ‘BioButton.’ They fought back – Fast Company
The BioButton was supposed to send them back to college safely. But concerns over the mandatory wearable’s data collection practices led to a student petition—and a school reversal.
Last week, Oakland University’s president Ora Hirsch Pescovitz sent out her usual email updating students on the college. This time, it included a link that pointed to a page explaining what to expect for the fall semester. The web page mentioned something called a BioButton. Students would be required to document their symptoms daily in a symptom-checking app and wear this thumbprint-size silicon patch that would record body temperature, ambient temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate, activity level, and sleep. It would also detect if you came into contact with someone with COVID-19.
There were certain things about the BioButton that concerned Tyler Dixon, a resident assistant at the Michigan-based Oakland University who will be a senior in the fall. He understood that the school was instituting this program as a public health measure, to ensure that students would be safe when they returned to school. But this BioButton would be tracking a lot of data, and he was concerned about who would be accessing it. He and his friends discussed the issue, and Dixon decided to launch a petition asking that Oakland University make the BioButton optional.