College discourse and ERDs
Published: 2020-09-14 04:53:52

#*Hello and welcome*

This is just a little chat about a Tech Crunch article covering some covid tracking privacy issues with a side of entity-relationship diagrams as an update to the previous model [here] (https://dev.to/curiocheshire/er-diagram-practice-pandemic-risk-example-pdk).

##**Is this allowed?**
In the state of Michigan is Albion College, where somewhere around 1,500 college students are currently locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic. But, unlike most of us in 'lockdown', they are genuinely locked on campus with each other.

Students at the liberal arts college are being required to download the app *'Aura'* that rolled out in 2020 to help trace and control the spread of Covid-19. The app allows the school to track test results, perform real-time contact tracing, and see what students are complying with the order to stay on campus, all to protect their safety and health. Of course, this comes with 24/7 tracking of each and every student's GPS location. 

This sort of tracking is generally perceived as a privacy issue, but this comes paired with the fact that the app itself was rolled out with serious bugs and insecurities baked in. The first security issue allowed easy access back-end servers and thus data that even just a curious student was able to find. The second issue relates to the QR code that shows students virus test status and basically allowed users to see other users' QR codes and info by just changing the web address. 

Now to scroll back a bit, even without blatant coding and logic issues with the build, I personally would have to say a big no if this were something installed at Penn State (my current university). I'm absolutely all for the safety aspect, protecting others by tracking contact and such is a great concept and has been done extremely well by companies like Google and Apple so far. However, I'm not about to give up my location 24/7 to my school or anyone for that matter, let alone with the gross mishandling of the data displayed by Aura.

I recommend looking up Google's method of contact tracing for the virus, which uses lots and lots of keys and Bluetooth rather than your GPS location.

##**Business time: ERD updates**
The last thing I published for my college course was a test ER diagram meant to cover the possible risk factors of an individual concerned in the current pandemic. I linked it at the top of this post, but [here](https://dev.to/curiocheshire/er-diagram-practice-pandemic-risk-example-pdk) it is again for those of us who won't like to scroll up again.

After being somewhat schooled in the methods of physical entity-relationship diagrams, I was given the chance to up the structure of my previous diagram and convert it into both a physical and a conceptual model. My old model was essentially a conceptual diagram to begin with, so all that truly changed was a little update to layout alignment and some more thoroughly written relationships.
###**Conceptual**
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/1od276hsjvfmrnfay8py.jpg)

The physical diagram counterpart is meant to be closer to a transition to SQL language as it works toward being a genuine, bonafide database. While less attractive, it covers more specifics to data and the relations thereof than the others.
###**Physical**
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/fnubdw6etmfiad707qnd.jpg)

I also made a new tuple example to accompany this because within the diagram it seems like I just took out everything about behavior, but that appearance is due to a restructure in how I thought about the data and how to build it. 

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/24bvdqmxn8hyodtw4yc8.PNG)

To figure out more about what I mean, watch my short video to see just what I mean.
[Concept to Physical ER Diagram Example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dylHs34ECM)

Or feel free to watch more youtube videos, but of professionals with a solid understanding and who likely have a finished degree unlike myself as of 2020.
[ER Diagram (ERD) - Definition & Overview | Lucidchart](https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/er-diagrams)

Through all the weird talk about security and scary college security, hope it's still a good example to learn from and you can always stay curious about what's going on.