U. student, alumnus launch Campus Anonymous
Jacob DonnellyDan Kang ’15 and Akshay Kumar ’14 launched Campus Anonymous, a chat website for Ivy League students, on Sunday. Kang and Kumar are alsothe creators of Tigers Anonymous,a similar website that only University students can use. As of Tuesday afternoon, approximately 400 users had registered and over 1,000 conversations had taken place, Kang said, adding that the most frequent registrations were from the University and Columbia but that all eight Ivy League schools were represented. Kang said that he and Kumar created Campus Anonymous both because University students were too small of a pool to ensure users would be able to be paired with someone else and because students at other schools had expressed an interest in the concept. “In the beginning there was a lot of usage [of Tigers Anonymous], but a lot of time when people went on during the day, there weren’t enough people on it, and they stopped coming back,” Kang said. Campus Anonymous retains some elements of Tigers Anonymous, such as anonymity, randomly selected prompts to help users begin conversations and the option for users to reveal their identities if both users in a pair agree, although Kumar noted there were approximately 20 to 30 percent more prompts on Campus Anonymous. A unique feature to Campus Anonymous is the introduction of a terms of service and a privacy policy, Kumar said, noting that they are paying for SSL encryption for the chats.Kang said that he and Kumar cannot see the content of chats, and they do not think there should not be a way for people with malicious intentions to view any of the chats or discern any of the users’ identities. Although Kang and Kumar copied a lot of the chatting code from Tigers Anonymous, they had to work on a new filtering and authentication system to make sure emails were associated with Ivy League students and not with alumni of those schools. “There was a lot more machinery with Tigers Anonymous choosing prompts, so we were able to streamline that, make that more efficient,” Kumar said.
