I was stumbling around the Princeton webpage today, much like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost, when I came across the following oddity.

On one page they list the placement records of all their recent PhD candidates. The candidates are not named, but they are referred to by dissertation title. The reason stated for this is:

Names are suppressed for reasons of privacy.

But one can tell quite a bit from the title. For example, one could probably guess who the candidate was who had the following dissertation titles and employment history:

LESS WORK FOR A THEORY OF SENSE. Monash (Australia); ANU (Australia); U Sheffield (UK); U. Edinburgh (UK), Permanent.

especially if one of one’s former PhD advisor had a similarly titled dissertation. So the privacy idea isn’t that strictly enforced. And actually, it is a little worse than that, because elsewhere on the site, there is a list of all recent PhD’s, listing who has graduated and what the title of their dissertation was.

Now in order to keep up the privacy preservation in order, I won’t link to the two pages in question, but I did find their proximity (and the ease with which I somewhat accidentally stumbled across them) somewhat odd given the announced privacy concerns.

I should say that in most cases the privacy concerns are not exactly serious. It is trivial to trace where someone works in academia. (Unless they have a particularly common name, they will be the first entry in a Google search, simply because universities still play a central role in the web.) But some PhDs no longer work in academia, even when they’ve graduated from Princeton, and the privacy concerns there are presumably greater.