As a freshmen boy coming to college, I heard it all.

I even believed the stories. Until a very recent time, I still believed it.

Does IT know when you watch porn? 

 I sat down with Marc Wallman, North Dakota State’s vice president for information technology, to bring my fears to reality.

I walked into his office expecting the worst. A packet of all my websites I visited in that bathroom before I went to see him perhaps? Maybe a snarky smile about the amount of times I visited Reddit during my last class?

Could it be true? Does this man know my search history, my personal browsing data?

I couldn’t take the anxiety anymore. It had been almost three years of dreaded assumptions. I had to ask the dreaded question.

“Do you know what we are looking at?”

No. He does not. You see, Wallman let my imagination down.

It was between the technical talk I got my answer. The stories aren’t true, rather they are merely fabrications. They are fun myths, yet myths nonetheless.

There is a great divide between what is IT and the understanding NDSU students have about it.

“We work much like an internet provider does,” Wallman said. He meant IT is not there to police you.

IT only cares about two things; no malware and no malicious activity.

Wallman said the NDSU community is full of very good internet people. Most people know what is okay to browse, when it is okay to browse it and where. Really, watching porn is a private matter.

Wallman said the assumption may come from K-12 Internet providers who usually seek to ban certain material and filter the internet.

He added filtering is a “very hard” thing to do. “It isn’t really worth our time either.”

Could it be true? What I had assumed all along. Was it just a myth?

It appears so. Wallman, although not actually telling me the great story, gave the story that makes the most sense. NDSU IT is a lot less like the National Security Agency than I had previously thought.

Wallman said there were only two circumstances in which IT would care if porn was being perused at NDSU. The first being if it was viewed on a school computer, in which would violate NDSU policy 158 regarding acceptable use on computers. The other is if one were to watch it in a public area.

The only time that Marc would mind if you were watching porn is if it was on a school computer, which would break Policy 158 policy on Acceptable Use. The only other time he would care would be if you were in a public place.

I asked Wallman if anyone had ever watched porn in the union on one of my upstairs nap couches. He said there’s never been a time he can recall, nor that he’s ever had to talk about students watching porn on campus before.

Believe it or not, we are adults, and what we choose to watch ultimately falls on ourselves. There are no secret content police. There is no one going to come and expel you. NDSU does not know your favorite porn website.

Rather, Wallman is a silent protector. His main concern is to provide NDSU with a safe and secure wireless network.