Picture this: you are driving back to campus after spending the weekend with your family. It is currently 1 a.m. and in one hour you will get back to your dorm and rest in preparation for the start of the new week. Suddenly, an abrupt silence fills the car as your phone dies, the music and GPS dying with it. You do not worry, though, since you know your way back from here and can live without Bluetooth for an hour.
That wave of relief is quickly overcome by anxiety, however, when you realize that your only way into Hofstra University and your residence hall has died as well. Your student identification (ID) card resides in your digital wallet through HofPass. As you arrive on campus, your zombie phone is barely able to tap you in at the front gate, but it does not work when you try to enter your building. You are locked out.
The above scenario is not just a hypothetical; it is exactly what happened to me the first weekend of November. I was locked out of my building for the fourth time this semester due to my phone being dead, and this time it was at 2 a.m., with no Resident Student Representative present at the front door to help me out. This experience – being as late at night as it was and having left me vulnerable without access to my building – really made me wonder, with Hofstra transitioning towards a future with less and less physical IDs, are digital student IDs safe?
According to Campus Access and Security Systems, the advantages that HofPass brings are that it is easy to use, reduces plastic waste and enhances security due to the need for biometric or password activation. Even though all of these things are good, they should not come at the expense of students’ safety. From a parent’s perspective, I don’t think I would be too happy to know there was a possibility for my child to get stuck outside of their building late at night after returning from activities. If there were an emergency, being in the safety of a residence hall versus being stuck outside could be the difference between escaping a threat and something bad happening to the student.
Some arguments that I’ve seen suggest that one’s phone losing charge could be compared to losing your physical card and that having one less thing to lug around is worth the trade-off. I simply don’t think it is comparable since you now need to bring a phone, wallet and then a charger on top of that to be extra safe, which is a lot to carry around when one is out having fun.
In my experience with HofPass thus far, building access is not the only thing that a student needs to worry about, either. Since the ID card is how a student uses their dining points, HofPass is necessary at every purchase. Sometimes, I will be at the register trying to pay for my meals with my dining plan, when the system would require several tries of tapping my phone and re-entering my password for the purchase to go through, even with sufficient charge.
A system as new as HofPass is bound to have growing pains, but fundamental roadblocks remain. Is the solution to return to physical cards? It may be too late to turn back now, but nobody ever had to worry about their plastic ID card running out of charge and locking them out, or needing to re-enter their password several times to pay for a Freshens smoothie. I now make sure I have a charger on me at all times to avoid dire situations again, and I hope others do the same.
