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Easing the communication also facilitates the abuse of the new services. The general policy which has been pursued in SiFEUP is to trust the users and act by education and persuasion whenever possible, but being prepared to become more restrictive if necessary.
The SiFEUP team monitors the system and when an abnormal situation is detected the rules of good behaviour known as Netiquette are reminded and made clear according to the concrete case. A dialog is tried with the perturbing element often raising some new and interesting legal questions and also discussing the principles of free access to information, privacy and common benefit. Most of the problems are solved this way.
In the case of the Dynamic Mail, the number of bad-taste jokes and misuses flooding everybody's mailboxes forced the implementation of a log to keep track of the system use and to trace the source of problems.
Another mechanism has been set up for a more complex situation. In order to help to identify a person in a big organisation as FEUP, connecting the name with a photograph is an invaluable aid, specially for teachers. But, when the photographs were added to the students' personal pages, some of them protested, and had the right to do so under the principle of protection of the personal image. The compromise obtained was to put under individual control whether the photo is displayed on the public personal page and to create a version of the same page with the photo only accessible to the teachers via password.
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