MUSE Students VoiceStudents VoiceMUSE · Mysore University School of Engineering

Privacy & Anonymity

Plain-language version. Last updated June 2026.

Pseudonymous, not fully anonymous

MUSE Students Voice is pseudonymous. We collect your USN, email, and password (or a Google sign-in) so that we can enforce one account per student and stop duplicate voting. We do not collect your full name, phone number, or year/section beyond what your USN encodes.

What other students see

  • Your USN is never shown on posts, votes, or comments.
  • Comments use a stable per-post handle like Student #A7F2. The same student gets the same handle on a given post, but a different handle on a different post — so people can follow a thread without anyone being identifiable across posts.
  • Vote tallies are public, but who voted which way is not.

What the system stores internally

The database knows which account owns which USN, which posts were written by that account, and which way that account voted. Row-level security policies prevent any normal student from reading this; the author of a post can identify their own posts, and that's it.

Who can see the link between USN and post

Only the platform administrator (currently the project maintainer) has the database access required to join a USN to a specific post. That access is used only for abuse handling — investigating spam, defamation, or threats reported via the flag system — and is never shared with the college, faculty, or leadership in the normal course of operation.

What leadership receives

When a complaint is verified and escalated, the email sent to the Director and Vice-Chancellor contains:

  • The complaint body, exactly as posted.
  • The community vote tally (e.g. "82% credibility, 41 votes").
  • A reference ID and a link to the public post.

The email does not include your USN, your email, or any other identifier that would let leadership trace the post back to you. The author of a verified complaint stays anonymous to the college.

Legal compulsion

If a court, law enforcement agency, or the university issues a valid legal request that specifically names a post, the administrator may be compelled to disclose the linked account. This has not happened and we will publish a note here if it ever does.

Questions? Email studentsvoice.muse@gmail.com. See also our Terms of Use.