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Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

175 points by johnny313 7y ago

anit010 7y ago
THERE ARE NO CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICERS IN K-12 EDUCATION https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Privacy-Online.html https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Privacy-Online.html AND ETHICS -- There isn't a single school district with a K-12 CPO. In fact, it is still extremely rare for districts to hire even one full-time employee dedicated to privacy. Student Privacy Bill Protection : No Parental Consent Needed for Data Mining also see https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/PRIVACY_INFORMATION.html https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/PRIVACY_INFORMATION.h...
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
"The local Brazosport Independent School District had recently hired a company called Social Sentinel to monitor public posts from all users, including adults, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The company's algorithms flagged Lafrenais's tweet as a potential threat. Automated alerts were sent to the district's superintendent, chief of police, director of student services, and director of guidance. All told, nearly 140 such alerts were delivered to Brazosport officials during the first eight months of this school year..." OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  I'm speechless. This is egregious and unacceptable. I'm thankful this kind of stuff didnt exist when I grew up.
  - Maximus9000 7y ago
    > I'm thankful this kind of stuff didnt exist when I grew up. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard an adult say this phrase lately, I'd be rich! Did adults used to say this phrase 30 years ago? What are we doing to ourselves and our kids?
    - falcolas 7y ago
      My parents lamented the lack of outside-school responsibilities (such as having to raise animals on a farm, both did so) as much as anything else. I think that is a far cry from "limited freedom to leave the house on my own", "digital bullying" (the personal bullying was sufficient, I'm grateful it didn't extend to my time at home), and "authoritative surveillance". The scope of changes between pre-tech childhood and post-tech is simply huge. Quite possibly unprecedented in history.
    - xfitm3 7y ago
      I'm sure every generation says it - but working in tech and being a staunch advocate of privacy I can't help but think it really is different this time. If my thoughts as a kid had been subject to outside scrutiny I don't know if I would have made it this far in life. Maybe I would've been better at hiding, but I think that is extremely detrimental to long term mental health.
    - cr0sh 7y ago
      It's kinda crazy. We say this - but I suspect we are a minority. Simply because "we" (some of us - not I) are parents of kids in these systems, but there are other parents of our age with kids in these systems who like them just fine - and I suspect there's more of them. Otherwise - why would "we" let these systems exist, if "we" are glad they didn't exist back when "we" were in school? I also suspect that those parents of our age who do support this today would also side with our views as well - if they were presented back when "we" were kids. But for some reason - I don't know how, why, or when or... - but people seem to somehow forget their past as children. I don't know if this is deliberate (in some cases it might be, possibly for valid or at least rational reasons - such as abuse or whatnot) - or if something else is going on...? Why is it that "we" (here on HN or elsewhere) can self-introspect and say "wow, I wouldn't have liked this as a kid - so why would I think my kid would like it, or their friends; heck I wouldn't like it myself as an adult" - but a larger majority (it seems) of adults seem to be unable to place themselves back in the shoes of their younger selves? Are we the strange ones? If it's all about numbers alone, we might be...
      - Maximus9000 7y ago
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  > This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations. The kind of school districts implementing these systems are likely districts with a lot of pro-authoritarian people or at least those kind of people hold a lot of key positions. While it may not be the primary goal, as far as these types of people generally care acclimating children to big-brother is either harmless or a side benefit.
  - neuralRiot 7y ago
    The primary goal is to "Do something about it" it doesn't matter if it works or not, same as in defense, if you company can develop an attractive enough product to secure a contract you're set, again it doesnt really matter if it does what it's supposed to do.
- momokoko 7y ago
  Unfortunately, it's pick one. Either: 1. Allow for potential bullying and sexual harassment and other things kids put each other through. 2. Monitor every single thing they do and police them at all times. We as a society need to make a choice. You cannot have a perfectly safe and positive environment at all times for children(and adults) without constant and detailed monitoring. My guess is that the correct answer lies somewhere in the middle. Ignoring that reality and avoiding handling this at the regulatory level will result in groups going either all the way to one side or all the way to the other. Edit: I'm shocked how insane and unrealistic the people downvoting this are. I feel so unbelievably bad if any of you have children or vote on any policy that has to do with children. Awful people. Just awful.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Its popular to create false dichotomies. Like this one. How about: monitor them sometimes and train them into good behavior patterns, so as to create a population of civil citizens You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance. Like any civil society.
    - momokoko 7y ago
      > You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance You absolutely, positively, cannot have that. Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Especially boys. The only way you prevent it all the time is to never leave boys alone in a group with no monitoring or supervision. Edit: If you are downvoting or disagreeing with this, you are part of the absurdly unreasonable expectations we have for our children. Especially boys. And are likely part of the reason 1 in 6 boys are diagnosed with ADHD for not meeting these insane ideals.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - bilbo0s 7y ago
        >Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Especially boys... I don't think you've ever been responsible for a group of adolescent girls. Far better than boys, at pretty much every aspect of bullying.
- philamonster 7y ago
  Google Apps for Education says hi.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    > There are no ads in G Suite for Education core services, and students’ personal information won’t be used to create ad profiles for targeting.[1] [1] https://edu.google.com/why-google/privacy-security https://edu.google.com/why-google/privacy-security
- GrinningFool 7y ago
  OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations. If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing. My advice to my son will be don't use social media; if you must use it, don't post publicly on it. If you must post publicly, know that everything you say will be visible forever to _someone_. And post accordingly.
  - notathingreally 7y ago
    > If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing. But in many cases they weren't. That article talks about taking personal photos off of a student's personal device just because they connected it to a school computer for a short time. It included things like nude photos. Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device. I don't see how anyone can think that's reasonable. Just because I bring a bag with personal letters into the school doesn't mean the school has a right to open those letters, read them, and make Xerox copies of them. It's the same with bringing a personal device to school.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device... This is where the law gets kids in way more trouble than is really necessary. There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. But think about it, to get that protection, you must report. So they surreptitiously lift the pics from a kid's phone, and then the alerts go to the police chief, kid's counselor, administrators, etc etc. From there it can make its way to public prosecutors really quickly if calmer heads don't prevail among the adults who got the initial alerts. And calmer heads rarely prevail in my experience. (To be fair, I think most police chiefs may have an actual obligation to let prosecutors know about it? Not sure?)
      - CWuestefeld 7y ago
- treis 7y ago
  >OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations. There's no privacy when you post things publicly on the internet.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    Semantics distract from the point at hand. There's no privacy when you leave your house either, but you still expect people (including school administrators) not to follow you around recording your actions and statements. There is a reasonable expectation to /not be stalked/ even when conducting yourself in an otherwise public setting. Calling this "privacy" is a loose application of the word, but we never really had the need to come up with another one before the information age made it economical to do this to everyone all the time.
    - treis 7y ago
      Why are you posting things publicly on the internet if not for other people to read them? If that's the case, what does it matter if a member of the public ends up reading it based on some filter? That's the difference compared with someone stalking a person. We don't generally go out into public to allow others to follow us.
      - homonculus1 7y ago
        And I don't generally post things publicly to allow an anonymous authority figure to compare every one of my statements against some hidden criteria of "acceptability", one which is highly likely to be skewed toward preserving the power of the person implementing it. "A member of the public ends up reading it" is reductionist. The two are more or less technically interchangeable due to the cheapness of digital monitoring, but if you think that's all that matters you're completely missing the point: the issue that you're ignoring is how this is done systematically and with a particular intent. It is not like overhearing a conversation in the park, it like is hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder. Total observation is socially and politically horrifying, but authoritarians like to take advantage of the fact that we never previously codified norms against it because it was resource prohibitive until the advent of computing.
- DoubleCribble 7y ago
  I disagree. The lesson here is: you teach the students how to protect their anonymity. For example, would you ever sign your name to some rude graffiti/foul language you drew in the boys/girls bathroom stall at school? Of course not! Why is online any different?
  - icelancer 7y ago
    You don't need to teach the kids this. They are already moving towards peer-to-peer, encrypted, and ephemeral forms of communication. They also lock their Instagrams, have secondary fake Instagrams (finstas), and obscure their identities. All the EFF privacy advocates who desperately hope that people will listen to them miss the forest for the trees. The kids are smart. They're adapting. Just like we did.
- tzs 7y ago
  140 alerts in 8 months is about one alert every 1.7 days. The Brazosport Independent School District has over 12k students and 800 teachers. I'd expect 12k students are Tweeting and Facebooking hundreds, if not thousands of times a day. Furthermore, the social media monitoring, according to the article, includes adults from the surrounding community, not just people associated with the school. I can't find population stats for that, but the county that the district is in has a population over over 360k. Adults probably don't Tweet and Facebook as much as kids, but there are probably still hundreds a day from them. It looks like only a tiny fraction of the posts generate an alert. The alerts come infrequently enough that those who receive them should easily have time to go look at them in context, which should let them quickly dismiss almost all false positives. I've having trouble seeing what I should be upset about here.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    The fact that it is happening at all? It’s like as if there was a ghostly principal (actually more like an army of officials, according to the post) hovering above us as I was growing up.
rgrieselhuber 7y ago
I always lose a few magical internet points when I say this, but, if possible, avoid public schools.
- oyebenny 7y ago
  And what have we learned about private institutions? But that leaves us with homeschooling...
  - rgrieselhuber 7y ago
    Homeschooling has come a long way. It’s a sacrifice, for sure, but far easier now than it was even 20 years ago.
    - cheesymuffin 7y ago
      People pick the strangest ways of resisting the system.
      - rgrieselhuber 7y ago
        Yeah, it is really weird to want to educate your own children.
        guitarbill 7y ago
        Might as well deprive them of normal social interactions and different opinions while you're at it. Personally, I'm glad my country does not allow such nonsense and hubris. Of course, it's a straw man, you can care about your children's education in other ways, and outside of school, too.
        rgrieselhuber 7y ago
        It varies depending on circumstances, of course, but the vast majority of homeschooled kids I've met are very well socialized, capable of reasoned debate, and quite well-rounded in their outlook on life. By contrast, in American public schools at least, I'm seeing a serious trend toward unhealthy social interactions, cyber bullying, teachers who only have time for testing, and more. If your country doesn't allow it, you may not have had the chance to observe the difference but it's pretty significant.
Mirioron 7y ago
I cannot believe that these people are so dense: >"Why would it have a chilling effect if the superintendent of the school might see something that slips through the system about someone went hunting?" he asked. "There's no threat." How is the following not harm? >He pointed to a recent incident in which Social Sentinel flagged a college student who threatened on Twitter to shoot his professor for scheduling an early morning exam. (The student, who said he intended no harm, was arrested.)
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  They're not dense. These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable. Their world view simply does not align with yours or mine. They simply do not consider the use these kind of systems to be fundamentally incompatible with free society the way you or I do.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    > These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable. Except they don't. The moment the totalitarian society started to demand conformance to something they don't like, you can be sure they would object.
    - rc_hadoken 7y ago
      And said state will take off its hat, apologize and disappear? C'mon mate...
    - closetohome 7y ago
      That's...literally everyone who supports totalitarian and authoritarian states. They support it because they share its values, and they like that those values are enforced. Nobody goes "well they put my ma in the gulag, but I still agree with them politically"
    - jakeogh 7y ago
devoply 7y ago
Schools in certain parts of the US, usually with more unruly students from lower income backgrounds, are pretty much set up like prisons. You can't leave the premises as the exits are heavily guarded, there are cops present, there are various sorts of checkpoints where things are searched. Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious. It's a bit of a mess.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  >Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious. Just getting them warmed up for the parole process later on.
cryoshon 7y ago
if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent. imagine how many times you made a snide remark about a teacher or a principal to your peers in confidence. now, the target of your jeer will know that you're talking shit -- and, much like if they were to overhear trash talk about them in the hallways, they won't tolerate it. and so a bunch of harmless children will be caught in the surveillance net, and punished for normal behavior. even worse, down the line you can be certain that state actors will gain access to the data sets produced by surveillance. then, in these kids' dossiers, they'll be marked as having anti-authoritarian tendencies as a result of their childhood discussions which were snooped on. throw in a social credit system, and someone may have a childhood remark following them for life.
- iamnothere 7y ago
  > if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent. This may sound hyperbolic to some people (my schools were fine), but it is very true that school administration has a tendency to attract petty authoritarians. Who is easier to rule with an iron fist than powerless children? I sometimes see things like the laptop spying scandal [0] and realize that I was very lucky to avoid these sorts of people as a kid. [0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-schools-spying-on-students-using-laptop-webcams--claims-lawsuit.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-s...
Analemma_ 7y ago
This is nasty, but the unpleasant truth is that these schools are just rationally responding to public pressure and doing CYA. Every time there's a school shooter, the first thing the parents and media do is dig through his angry Facebook posts and go, "Look at all these red flags! Why wasn't anything done?". Well, now the schools are doing something. It's not the right thing to do, and it's not going to fix anything, but getting angry at the schools isn't going to cause them to change course: they're responding to public demand. You need to start talking to parents and educating them.
- yepguy 7y ago
  Wouldn't increased monitoring also increase their liability when something does go terribly wrong?
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    My first thought exactly. If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive I would have to imagine that opens them up to far greater liability than simply not knowing about the behavior in the first place.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive... Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false positive? I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the problem. Not everyone means "I'd kill for that test answer sheet" when they write "I'd kill for that test answer sheet".
      - elliekelly 7y ago
        > I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the problem. The issues of school administrator overreach and school district liability for negligence are not mutually exclusive. > Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false positive? Knowing what I know about liability and knowing what I know about compliance monitoring systems with high rates of false positives is precisely why I said what I said. Negligence = known or should have known of X Efforts to hold schools accountable for shootings have historically been difficult because the plaintiffs must show (1) but for the action of the school, the injury would not have occurred and (2) the injury was a foreseeable result of the school's negligence. This monitoring system creates actual knowledge of a potential threat where most law suits over school shootings have had to argue the school "should have known" and requires the school to take make a record of their decision for every alert (investigate or ignore).
arikr 7y ago
Dang could we possibly get a new title on this? The default one is a bit clickbaity.
- srs_sput 7y ago
  Also a link to the non mobile site please
  - apearson 7y ago
    Non-Mobile Link: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-deploying-massive-digital-surveillance-systems.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-de...
esaym 7y ago
Ah Clute, Texas. Howdy from Brazosport class of 2002! This is the second article mentioning this area on HN I've seen in the last 3 years or so. The first one mentioned Brazosport as the dropout capital of the entire USA. So I doubt anyone within a 100 mile radius of there has ever heard of HN (but waiting to be proven wrong). Edit: I guess to add more context. This is probably an example of a small, underfunded, school district being coaxed into purchasing something it doesn't even need, or the administration doesn't even understand.
- danmg 7y ago
  The school district I graduated from, around the same time, hired some consultant who used Brazosport, TX as the role model on how to improve their NCLB related standardized test scores. It did not turn out well.
  - esaym 7y ago
    Brazosport (in the mid 1990's) had very good scores on the standardized tests. But that was literally all they taught. And this was the TAAS test which had very little content in it.
    - danmg 7y ago
      Yeah. They forced us to do things like, having seniors in the AP literature class spend 15 minutes of class doing a worksheet on how to use a dictionary.
    - danmg 7y ago
      This is the straight up propaganda they were selling: https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-2001-04-01-3363949-story.html https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-2001-04-01-3363949-story.h... .
      - esaym 7y ago
        Wow talk about nostalgia! Mrs. Sale was the elementary principal in the 1990's. She was nice, though I never got sent to her office in elementary school. My trouble years started after 5th grade. In 5th grade my teacher was Mr. Davis. The only man teacher in the elementary. There were plenty of rumors going around about how he had the hots for Mrs. Sale. And in the article's date of 2001 and with the new name of Mrs 'Sale-Davis', I guess the rumors were right! I was a Karankawa in 7th grade and a Mayan in 8th. I never knew what the purpose of the 'pep rallies' were. Just figured it was what all schools did. I don't even know what was talked about, I was just happy to get out of class. Sometimes my buddy and I would try to pick up rocks on the way to the gym to throw at people from the stands. Or a couple of times we'd sneak to the bathroom and hide out there but that was really boring. I did think it was somewhat strange that we organized our grades and classes into Indian tribe names. Gang violence was all around us and it seemed to be an inappropriate parody. Even more interesting is the resistance in 1992 it speaks of with some teachers quitting over the new ideas. I know in the early 1990's, several teachers and counselors moved from Brazosport to its rival a few towns over 'Brasozwood'. Perhaps that was the reason. I only knew of that because I briefly attended Brasozwood in the 8th grade and later in life found a collection of year books from the two schools and was perplexed that many of the administrators I knew from Brasozwood were listed in the Brazosport year books of the 1980's. >"Brazosport is unabashed about admitting it teaches to the test." I guess the question is, "but is that right"? "I know you're heading to the bathroom to tuck in that shirt," she tells a 10th-grade boy, who smiles widely before ducking into the men's room." <-- heck that was probably me!
e12e 7y ago
"the secret [to creating fiction about technology that stays relevant] is basically to assume that people will be really stupid about technology for the foreseeable future." Cory Doctorow on the anniversary of "Little Brother" https://craphound.com/littlebrother/ https://craphound.com/littlebrother/
yepguy 7y ago
To fight this, I don't think we should be talking about privacy or rights. That's all very important, but society is already fairly desensitized to that language, and the pro-surveillance side can literally point to the dead bodies of real children. Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children. Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  That won't work either though. I can hear it now: <sarcasm> "Well, if by 'increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior' you mean 'not molesting the girls and refraining from committing school shootings' then maybe they should have systems like this!" </sarcasm> You need to have some arguments not centered around the idea of behavior. Because that idea will be thrown back at you almost immediately. Behavior is exactly what these people will say they are trying to change.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    It’s so crazy considering the kids are exhibiting the exact same behavior as their parents 20-30 years ago. Puberty isn’t new...
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      From some distance it looks to me like kids today are aren't exhibiting the same behavior as their parents. Their parents were oh so much much worse behaved.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  >they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible. Wait, I thought that was school in a nutshell already. :D That's certainly all it did for me until I hit college.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
It's not clear from the article how the system monitors encrypted social media traffic. Perhaps Twitter as it is public afterward, right? Or does it look for public posts to local groups in Facebook? Or everyone has location tagging on posts on other sites? How are these companies getting their information to analyze?
- mirimir 7y ago
  They just look at public posts, I guess. What puzzles me is this: > Social media monitoring companies track the posts of everyone in the areas surrounding schools, including adults. Do Facebook, Twitter, etc expose geotags in posts?
  - esaym 7y ago
    I'm wondering the same. There's another company that does the same[0] and probably several more. I know I've read reports of police departments getting more lucrative access into private facebook posts. Perhaps it is the same for a company trying to "help" a school district as well. 0:https://geolistening.com/ https://geolistening.com/
- handzbagz1 7y ago
  I'm not sure if this is what you mean but most of these systems install a HTTPS certificate on the device so they can analyse the data and re-encrypt it.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    And how to do that on random mobile devices in the area?
apearson 7y ago
Non-Mobile Link: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-deploying-massive-digital-surveillance-systems.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-de...
dqpb 7y ago
This should be fairly easy to DOS
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Not quite as easy as your Jedi Hand Wave-y assertion makes it out to be. Letting the Authorities acclimate children to this sort of environment is dangerous for society.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Only if you aren't afraid of the ridiculous consequences.
- aitchnyu 7y ago
  They could adopt a vocabulary equivalent to Ad Nauseum: "Oh shoot", "this song is my cocaine", "I'm gunning for you".
elliekelly 7y ago
> Evergreen Public Schools in Washington state, for example, started using the company's service this school year. Between September and mid-March, the system flagged more than 9,000 incidents in the 26,000-student district. The overwhelming majority-84 percent-were for minor violations, such as profanity. The fact that the system even monitors for profanity at all tells me its purpose has a lot more to do with student surveillance than it does with student safety.
- notathingreally 7y ago
  That was exactly my thought. How does finding an assignment with the word "pussy" in it help anyone? (Plus if it's an assignment, wouldn't the teacher eventually see it? WTF?) I just don't get what parents and school administrators think they're achieving with this given the potential harm that can come from it. Were I a parent, I certainly wouldn't want some random person at the school to have access to everything my kid does online. Especially knowing how creepy some of the school administrators I dealt with growing up were!
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    Having had my 1A rights flagrantly violated by a petty administrator, I wholeheartedly agree. We need to worry about surveilling dysfunctional bureaucrats and their behavior, not students.
- TheOperator 7y ago
  I don't nessecarily have an issue with surveillance systems as they act as force multipliers for all sorts of noble causes. Surveillance systems should strictly be used for physical safety, anti-vandalism, and loss prevention purposes. You're not preparing kids to succeed by micromanaging them from behind a series of monitors. At all. People who intend to use the system to punish the kids for swearing by no means should be allowed access. The teachers and even the principal really shouldn't even have access to reduce the temptation to abuse the surveillance system. If they keep getting access the surveillance system should be thrown in the trash. Bosses who use similar systems to keep their employees working can also expect nothing better than mediocrity and a widespread CYA mentality.
panzagl 7y ago
Do any of the naysayers here work in a public capacity- teacher, law enforcement, military/intelligence, etc? Have you ever been solely responsible for the security and well-being of more than, say a half-dozen total strangers? It's a hard problem, a continual tweaking of what we would see as engineering trade-offs, usually performed by people with minimal training, support, or reward who are stuck with the responsibility by default. Supposedly we're here because we want to apply technology to hard problems- well, here's one of the hardest, and here's how it's been applied so far. Let's have a more reasonable discussion than a bunch of thin-veiled whining about how it will affect our torrents.
- ameister14 7y ago
  I have, yes. However, I don't believe it's always necessary to have experience doing something in order to understand how it works - humans developed pretty well in ways to enable us to share experience with one another. Anyway, as I see it first we should agree on what exactly the problem is; in this case, it appears this was created to solve the problem of mass shootings in schools. If that is the problem, this solution goes well beyond what is necessary to solve it. Further, it remains to be seen whether this solution actually works to solve the problem at all. So you have something that might work but definitely does a bunch of unnecessary things. At best, you have an incredibly inefficient solution and at worst something that actively harms people.
  - panzagl 7y ago
    How does it go beyond? The systems discussed either grab public social media, or monitor information created on the schools' machines. I don't know that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy on either.
    - ameister14 7y ago
      First, I'd say monitoring profanity, the word 'gay,' mentions of drugs and sex, etc. does not have bearing on the primary issue at hand: gun violence. If you can outline for me how giving a student body principal information on a student setting up a dating profile serves to solve the issue of mass shootings, I'd appreciate it. Second, the systems discussed pull information from student's phones and directly monitor communication using school email addresses. The former is an issue for obvious reasons and the latter is an issue because you actually should have a reasonable expectation of private communication through mail. The fact that it is possible for the school to read your mail is immaterial. It is possible for the government to read your mail. The government does not get to do so, despite the many, many crimes committed through the mail and by people that receive mail.
faissaloo 7y ago
I was (and still am) against the monitoring, restriction and limiting of student devices at school. I find it deeply disturbing that children are going to be monitored when they aren't even on school grounds, it's nightmarish. Every day homeschooling my future children looks exponentially better.
vangelis 7y ago
I figure the psychological damage will create even more school shooters. shrug
manfredo 7y ago
I was the type of high school student that would deliberately spam profanity and other things that would trigger this system just to spite the administrators. Privacy through obfuscation: when alarm bell rings all the time then the alarm bell becomes meaningless.
atoav 7y ago
Teach them early that we don’t live in free societies any more. How else would you go about building tomorrow’s distopia? We actually need the opposite: we need schools that create educated, crtically thinking individuals that don’t hessitate to work together for thw future.
Avamander 7y ago
I think this is just a strategy for moving the Overton window. "Look what we can do! Instead we opted in for this [vendor] MITM proxy and cameras in each classroom that snoop on your kids' activities! Much less invasive ;)"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shapiro1 7y ago
I bullied a kid in middle school to the point where he switched classes. Teachers didn’t panick and kick me out, rather they listened to both sides and let us figure it out. We talked and became really good friends, even to this day! Humans aren’t perfect. I’m not saying bullying is good, but the best solution is not to punishment. I’d certainly spiral out of control and become a monster had I been kicked out. Scandinavian pedagogy is great!

175 points by johnny313 7y ago

THERE ARE NO CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICERS IN K-12 EDUCATION https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Privacy-Online.html https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Privacy-Online.html AND ETHICS -- There isn't a single school district with a K-12 CPO. In fact, it is still extremely rare for districts to hire even one full-time employee dedicated to privacy. Student Privacy Bill Protection : No Parental Consent Needed for Data Mining also see https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/PRIVACY_INFORMATION.html https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/PRIVACY_INFORMATION.h...

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

"The local Brazosport Independent School District had recently hired a company called Social Sentinel to monitor public posts from all users, including adults, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The company's algorithms flagged Lafrenais's tweet as a potential threat. Automated alerts were sent to the district's superintendent, chief of police, director of student services, and director of guidance. All told, nearly 140 such alerts were delivered to Brazosport officials during the first eight months of this school year..." OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations.

xfitm3 7y ago
I'm speechless. This is egregious and unacceptable. I'm thankful this kind of stuff didnt exist when I grew up.
- Maximus9000 7y ago
  > I'm thankful this kind of stuff didnt exist when I grew up. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard an adult say this phrase lately, I'd be rich! Did adults used to say this phrase 30 years ago? What are we doing to ourselves and our kids?
  - falcolas 7y ago
    My parents lamented the lack of outside-school responsibilities (such as having to raise animals on a farm, both did so) as much as anything else. I think that is a far cry from "limited freedom to leave the house on my own", "digital bullying" (the personal bullying was sufficient, I'm grateful it didn't extend to my time at home), and "authoritative surveillance". The scope of changes between pre-tech childhood and post-tech is simply huge. Quite possibly unprecedented in history.
  - xfitm3 7y ago
    I'm sure every generation says it - but working in tech and being a staunch advocate of privacy I can't help but think it really is different this time. If my thoughts as a kid had been subject to outside scrutiny I don't know if I would have made it this far in life. Maybe I would've been better at hiding, but I think that is extremely detrimental to long term mental health.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    It's kinda crazy. We say this - but I suspect we are a minority. Simply because "we" (some of us - not I) are parents of kids in these systems, but there are other parents of our age with kids in these systems who like them just fine - and I suspect there's more of them. Otherwise - why would "we" let these systems exist, if "we" are glad they didn't exist back when "we" were in school? I also suspect that those parents of our age who do support this today would also side with our views as well - if they were presented back when "we" were kids. But for some reason - I don't know how, why, or when or... - but people seem to somehow forget their past as children. I don't know if this is deliberate (in some cases it might be, possibly for valid or at least rational reasons - such as abuse or whatnot) - or if something else is going on...? Why is it that "we" (here on HN or elsewhere) can self-introspect and say "wow, I wouldn't have liked this as a kid - so why would I think my kid would like it, or their friends; heck I wouldn't like it myself as an adult" - but a larger majority (it seems) of adults seem to be unable to place themselves back in the shoes of their younger selves? Are we the strange ones? If it's all about numbers alone, we might be...
    - Maximus9000 7y ago
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
> This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations. The kind of school districts implementing these systems are likely districts with a lot of pro-authoritarian people or at least those kind of people hold a lot of key positions. While it may not be the primary goal, as far as these types of people generally care acclimating children to big-brother is either harmless or a side benefit.
- neuralRiot 7y ago
  The primary goal is to "Do something about it" it doesn't matter if it works or not, same as in defense, if you company can develop an attractive enough product to secure a contract you're set, again it doesnt really matter if it does what it's supposed to do.
momokoko 7y ago
Unfortunately, it's pick one. Either: 1. Allow for potential bullying and sexual harassment and other things kids put each other through. 2. Monitor every single thing they do and police them at all times. We as a society need to make a choice. You cannot have a perfectly safe and positive environment at all times for children(and adults) without constant and detailed monitoring. My guess is that the correct answer lies somewhere in the middle. Ignoring that reality and avoiding handling this at the regulatory level will result in groups going either all the way to one side or all the way to the other. Edit: I'm shocked how insane and unrealistic the people downvoting this are. I feel so unbelievably bad if any of you have children or vote on any policy that has to do with children. Awful people. Just awful.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Its popular to create false dichotomies. Like this one. How about: monitor them sometimes and train them into good behavior patterns, so as to create a population of civil citizens You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance. Like any civil society.
  - momokoko 7y ago
    > You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance You absolutely, positively, cannot have that. Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Especially boys. The only way you prevent it all the time is to never leave boys alone in a group with no monitoring or supervision. Edit: If you are downvoting or disagreeing with this, you are part of the absurdly unreasonable expectations we have for our children. Especially boys. And are likely part of the reason 1 in 6 boys are diagnosed with ADHD for not meeting these insane ideals.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Especially boys... I don't think you've ever been responsible for a group of adolescent girls. Far better than boys, at pretty much every aspect of bullying.
philamonster 7y ago
Google Apps for Education says hi.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > There are no ads in G Suite for Education core services, and students’ personal information won’t be used to create ad profiles for targeting.[1] [1] https://edu.google.com/why-google/privacy-security https://edu.google.com/why-google/privacy-security
GrinningFool 7y ago
OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations. If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing. My advice to my son will be don't use social media; if you must use it, don't post publicly on it. If you must post publicly, know that everything you say will be visible forever to _someone_. And post accordingly.
- notathingreally 7y ago
  > If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing. But in many cases they weren't. That article talks about taking personal photos off of a student's personal device just because they connected it to a school computer for a short time. It included things like nude photos. Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device. I don't see how anyone can think that's reasonable. Just because I bring a bag with personal letters into the school doesn't mean the school has a right to open those letters, read them, and make Xerox copies of them. It's the same with bringing a personal device to school.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device... This is where the law gets kids in way more trouble than is really necessary. There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. But think about it, to get that protection, you must report. So they surreptitiously lift the pics from a kid's phone, and then the alerts go to the police chief, kid's counselor, administrators, etc etc. From there it can make its way to public prosecutors really quickly if calmer heads don't prevail among the adults who got the initial alerts. And calmer heads rarely prevail in my experience. (To be fair, I think most police chiefs may have an actual obligation to let prosecutors know about it? Not sure?)
    - CWuestefeld 7y ago
treis 7y ago
>OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations. There's no privacy when you post things publicly on the internet.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  Semantics distract from the point at hand. There's no privacy when you leave your house either, but you still expect people (including school administrators) not to follow you around recording your actions and statements. There is a reasonable expectation to /not be stalked/ even when conducting yourself in an otherwise public setting. Calling this "privacy" is a loose application of the word, but we never really had the need to come up with another one before the information age made it economical to do this to everyone all the time.
  - treis 7y ago
    Why are you posting things publicly on the internet if not for other people to read them? If that's the case, what does it matter if a member of the public ends up reading it based on some filter? That's the difference compared with someone stalking a person. We don't generally go out into public to allow others to follow us.
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      And I don't generally post things publicly to allow an anonymous authority figure to compare every one of my statements against some hidden criteria of "acceptability", one which is highly likely to be skewed toward preserving the power of the person implementing it. "A member of the public ends up reading it" is reductionist. The two are more or less technically interchangeable due to the cheapness of digital monitoring, but if you think that's all that matters you're completely missing the point: the issue that you're ignoring is how this is done systematically and with a particular intent. It is not like overhearing a conversation in the park, it like is hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder. Total observation is socially and politically horrifying, but authoritarians like to take advantage of the fact that we never previously codified norms against it because it was resource prohibitive until the advent of computing.
DoubleCribble 7y ago
I disagree. The lesson here is: you teach the students how to protect their anonymity. For example, would you ever sign your name to some rude graffiti/foul language you drew in the boys/girls bathroom stall at school? Of course not! Why is online any different?
- icelancer 7y ago
  You don't need to teach the kids this. They are already moving towards peer-to-peer, encrypted, and ephemeral forms of communication. They also lock their Instagrams, have secondary fake Instagrams (finstas), and obscure their identities. All the EFF privacy advocates who desperately hope that people will listen to them miss the forest for the trees. The kids are smart. They're adapting. Just like we did.
tzs 7y ago
140 alerts in 8 months is about one alert every 1.7 days. The Brazosport Independent School District has over 12k students and 800 teachers. I'd expect 12k students are Tweeting and Facebooking hundreds, if not thousands of times a day. Furthermore, the social media monitoring, according to the article, includes adults from the surrounding community, not just people associated with the school. I can't find population stats for that, but the county that the district is in has a population over over 360k. Adults probably don't Tweet and Facebook as much as kids, but there are probably still hundreds a day from them. It looks like only a tiny fraction of the posts generate an alert. The alerts come infrequently enough that those who receive them should easily have time to go look at them in context, which should let them quickly dismiss almost all false positives. I've having trouble seeing what I should be upset about here.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  The fact that it is happening at all? It’s like as if there was a ghostly principal (actually more like an army of officials, according to the post) hovering above us as I was growing up.

rgrieselhuber 7y ago

I always lose a few magical internet points when I say this, but, if possible, avoid public schools.

oyebenny 7y ago
And what have we learned about private institutions? But that leaves us with homeschooling...
- rgrieselhuber 7y ago
  Homeschooling has come a long way. It’s a sacrifice, for sure, but far easier now than it was even 20 years ago.
  - cheesymuffin 7y ago
    People pick the strangest ways of resisting the system.
    - rgrieselhuber 7y ago
      Yeah, it is really weird to want to educate your own children.
      - guitarbill 7y ago
        Might as well deprive them of normal social interactions and different opinions while you're at it. Personally, I'm glad my country does not allow such nonsense and hubris. Of course, it's a straw man, you can care about your children's education in other ways, and outside of school, too.
        rgrieselhuber 7y ago
        It varies depending on circumstances, of course, but the vast majority of homeschooled kids I've met are very well socialized, capable of reasoned debate, and quite well-rounded in their outlook on life. By contrast, in American public schools at least, I'm seeing a serious trend toward unhealthy social interactions, cyber bullying, teachers who only have time for testing, and more. If your country doesn't allow it, you may not have had the chance to observe the difference but it's pretty significant.

Mirioron 7y ago

I cannot believe that these people are so dense: >"Why would it have a chilling effect if the superintendent of the school might see something that slips through the system about someone went hunting?" he asked. "There's no threat." How is the following not harm? >He pointed to a recent incident in which Social Sentinel flagged a college student who threatened on Twitter to shoot his professor for scheduling an early morning exam. (The student, who said he intended no harm, was arrested.)

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
They're not dense. These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable. Their world view simply does not align with yours or mine. They simply do not consider the use these kind of systems to be fundamentally incompatible with free society the way you or I do.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  > These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable. Except they don't. The moment the totalitarian society started to demand conformance to something they don't like, you can be sure they would object.
  - rc_hadoken 7y ago
    And said state will take off its hat, apologize and disappear? C'mon mate...
  - closetohome 7y ago
    That's...literally everyone who supports totalitarian and authoritarian states. They support it because they share its values, and they like that those values are enforced. Nobody goes "well they put my ma in the gulag, but I still agree with them politically"
  - jakeogh 7y ago

devoply 7y ago

Schools in certain parts of the US, usually with more unruly students from lower income backgrounds, are pretty much set up like prisons. You can't leave the premises as the exits are heavily guarded, there are cops present, there are various sorts of checkpoints where things are searched. Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious. It's a bit of a mess.

noonespecial 7y ago
>Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious. Just getting them warmed up for the parole process later on.

cryoshon 7y ago

if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent. imagine how many times you made a snide remark about a teacher or a principal to your peers in confidence. now, the target of your jeer will know that you're talking shit -- and, much like if they were to overhear trash talk about them in the hallways, they won't tolerate it. and so a bunch of harmless children will be caught in the surveillance net, and punished for normal behavior. even worse, down the line you can be certain that state actors will gain access to the data sets produced by surveillance. then, in these kids' dossiers, they'll be marked as having anti-authoritarian tendencies as a result of their childhood discussions which were snooped on. throw in a social credit system, and someone may have a childhood remark following them for life.

iamnothere 7y ago
> if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent. This may sound hyperbolic to some people (my schools were fine), but it is very true that school administration has a tendency to attract petty authoritarians. Who is easier to rule with an iron fist than powerless children? I sometimes see things like the laptop spying scandal [0] and realize that I was very lucky to avoid these sorts of people as a kid. [0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-schools-spying-on-students-using-laptop-webcams--claims-lawsuit.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-s...

Analemma_ 7y ago

This is nasty, but the unpleasant truth is that these schools are just rationally responding to public pressure and doing CYA. Every time there's a school shooter, the first thing the parents and media do is dig through his angry Facebook posts and go, "Look at all these red flags! Why wasn't anything done?". Well, now the schools are doing something. It's not the right thing to do, and it's not going to fix anything, but getting angry at the schools isn't going to cause them to change course: they're responding to public demand. You need to start talking to parents and educating them.

yepguy 7y ago
Wouldn't increased monitoring also increase their liability when something does go terribly wrong?
- elliekelly 7y ago
  My first thought exactly. If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive I would have to imagine that opens them up to far greater liability than simply not knowing about the behavior in the first place.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive... Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false positive? I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the problem. Not everyone means "I'd kill for that test answer sheet" when they write "I'd kill for that test answer sheet".
    - elliekelly 7y ago
      > I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the problem. The issues of school administrator overreach and school district liability for negligence are not mutually exclusive. > Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false positive? Knowing what I know about liability and knowing what I know about compliance monitoring systems with high rates of false positives is precisely why I said what I said. Negligence = known or should have known of X Efforts to hold schools accountable for shootings have historically been difficult because the plaintiffs must show (1) but for the action of the school, the injury would not have occurred and (2) the injury was a foreseeable result of the school's negligence. This monitoring system creates actual knowledge of a potential threat where most law suits over school shootings have had to argue the school "should have known" and requires the school to take make a record of their decision for every alert (investigate or ignore).

arikr 7y ago

Dang could we possibly get a new title on this? The default one is a bit clickbaity.

srs_sput 7y ago
Also a link to the non mobile site please
- apearson 7y ago
  Non-Mobile Link: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-deploying-massive-digital-surveillance-systems.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-de...

esaym 7y ago

Ah Clute, Texas. Howdy from Brazosport class of 2002! This is the second article mentioning this area on HN I've seen in the last 3 years or so. The first one mentioned Brazosport as the dropout capital of the entire USA. So I doubt anyone within a 100 mile radius of there has ever heard of HN (but waiting to be proven wrong). Edit: I guess to add more context. This is probably an example of a small, underfunded, school district being coaxed into purchasing something it doesn't even need, or the administration doesn't even understand.

danmg 7y ago
The school district I graduated from, around the same time, hired some consultant who used Brazosport, TX as the role model on how to improve their NCLB related standardized test scores. It did not turn out well.
- esaym 7y ago
  Brazosport (in the mid 1990's) had very good scores on the standardized tests. But that was literally all they taught. And this was the TAAS test which had very little content in it.
  - danmg 7y ago
    Yeah. They forced us to do things like, having seniors in the AP literature class spend 15 minutes of class doing a worksheet on how to use a dictionary.
  - danmg 7y ago
    This is the straight up propaganda they were selling: https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-2001-04-01-3363949-story.html https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-2001-04-01-3363949-story.h... .
    - esaym 7y ago
      Wow talk about nostalgia! Mrs. Sale was the elementary principal in the 1990's. She was nice, though I never got sent to her office in elementary school. My trouble years started after 5th grade. In 5th grade my teacher was Mr. Davis. The only man teacher in the elementary. There were plenty of rumors going around about how he had the hots for Mrs. Sale. And in the article's date of 2001 and with the new name of Mrs 'Sale-Davis', I guess the rumors were right! I was a Karankawa in 7th grade and a Mayan in 8th. I never knew what the purpose of the 'pep rallies' were. Just figured it was what all schools did. I don't even know what was talked about, I was just happy to get out of class. Sometimes my buddy and I would try to pick up rocks on the way to the gym to throw at people from the stands. Or a couple of times we'd sneak to the bathroom and hide out there but that was really boring. I did think it was somewhat strange that we organized our grades and classes into Indian tribe names. Gang violence was all around us and it seemed to be an inappropriate parody. Even more interesting is the resistance in 1992 it speaks of with some teachers quitting over the new ideas. I know in the early 1990's, several teachers and counselors moved from Brazosport to its rival a few towns over 'Brasozwood'. Perhaps that was the reason. I only knew of that because I briefly attended Brasozwood in the 8th grade and later in life found a collection of year books from the two schools and was perplexed that many of the administrators I knew from Brasozwood were listed in the Brazosport year books of the 1980's. >"Brazosport is unabashed about admitting it teaches to the test." I guess the question is, "but is that right"? "I know you're heading to the bathroom to tuck in that shirt," she tells a 10th-grade boy, who smiles widely before ducking into the men's room." <-- heck that was probably me!

e12e 7y ago

"the secret [to creating fiction about technology that stays relevant] is basically to assume that people will be really stupid about technology for the foreseeable future." Cory Doctorow on the anniversary of "Little Brother" https://craphound.com/littlebrother/ https://craphound.com/littlebrother/

yepguy 7y ago

To fight this, I don't think we should be talking about privacy or rights. That's all very important, but society is already fairly desensitized to that language, and the pro-surveillance side can literally point to the dead bodies of real children. Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children. Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.

bilbo0s 7y ago
That won't work either though. I can hear it now: <sarcasm> "Well, if by 'increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior' you mean 'not molesting the girls and refraining from committing school shootings' then maybe they should have systems like this!" </sarcasm> You need to have some arguments not centered around the idea of behavior. Because that idea will be thrown back at you almost immediately. Behavior is exactly what these people will say they are trying to change.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  It’s so crazy considering the kids are exhibiting the exact same behavior as their parents 20-30 years ago. Puberty isn’t new...
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    From some distance it looks to me like kids today are aren't exhibiting the same behavior as their parents. Their parents were oh so much much worse behaved.
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
>they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible. Wait, I thought that was school in a nutshell already. :D That's certainly all it did for me until I hit college.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

It's not clear from the article how the system monitors encrypted social media traffic. Perhaps Twitter as it is public afterward, right? Or does it look for public posts to local groups in Facebook? Or everyone has location tagging on posts on other sites? How are these companies getting their information to analyze?

mirimir 7y ago
They just look at public posts, I guess. What puzzles me is this: > Social media monitoring companies track the posts of everyone in the areas surrounding schools, including adults. Do Facebook, Twitter, etc expose geotags in posts?
- esaym 7y ago
  I'm wondering the same. There's another company that does the same[0] and probably several more. I know I've read reports of police departments getting more lucrative access into private facebook posts. Perhaps it is the same for a company trying to "help" a school district as well. 0:https://geolistening.com/ https://geolistening.com/
handzbagz1 7y ago
I'm not sure if this is what you mean but most of these systems install a HTTPS certificate on the device so they can analyse the data and re-encrypt it.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  And how to do that on random mobile devices in the area?

apearson 7y ago

Non-Mobile Link: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-deploying-massive-digital-surveillance-systems.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-de...

dqpb 7y ago

This should be fairly easy to DOS

bilbo0s 7y ago
Not quite as easy as your Jedi Hand Wave-y assertion makes it out to be. Letting the Authorities acclimate children to this sort of environment is dangerous for society.
Avamander 7y ago
Only if you aren't afraid of the ridiculous consequences.
aitchnyu 7y ago
They could adopt a vocabulary equivalent to Ad Nauseum: "Oh shoot", "this song is my cocaine", "I'm gunning for you".

elliekelly 7y ago

> Evergreen Public Schools in Washington state, for example, started using the company's service this school year. Between September and mid-March, the system flagged more than 9,000 incidents in the 26,000-student district. The overwhelming majority-84 percent-were for minor violations, such as profanity. The fact that the system even monitors for profanity at all tells me its purpose has a lot more to do with student surveillance than it does with student safety.

notathingreally 7y ago
That was exactly my thought. How does finding an assignment with the word "pussy" in it help anyone? (Plus if it's an assignment, wouldn't the teacher eventually see it? WTF?) I just don't get what parents and school administrators think they're achieving with this given the potential harm that can come from it. Were I a parent, I certainly wouldn't want some random person at the school to have access to everything my kid does online. Especially knowing how creepy some of the school administrators I dealt with growing up were!
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Having had my 1A rights flagrantly violated by a petty administrator, I wholeheartedly agree. We need to worry about surveilling dysfunctional bureaucrats and their behavior, not students.
TheOperator 7y ago
I don't nessecarily have an issue with surveillance systems as they act as force multipliers for all sorts of noble causes. Surveillance systems should strictly be used for physical safety, anti-vandalism, and loss prevention purposes. You're not preparing kids to succeed by micromanaging them from behind a series of monitors. At all. People who intend to use the system to punish the kids for swearing by no means should be allowed access. The teachers and even the principal really shouldn't even have access to reduce the temptation to abuse the surveillance system. If they keep getting access the surveillance system should be thrown in the trash. Bosses who use similar systems to keep their employees working can also expect nothing better than mediocrity and a widespread CYA mentality.

panzagl 7y ago

Do any of the naysayers here work in a public capacity- teacher, law enforcement, military/intelligence, etc? Have you ever been solely responsible for the security and well-being of more than, say a half-dozen total strangers? It's a hard problem, a continual tweaking of what we would see as engineering trade-offs, usually performed by people with minimal training, support, or reward who are stuck with the responsibility by default. Supposedly we're here because we want to apply technology to hard problems- well, here's one of the hardest, and here's how it's been applied so far. Let's have a more reasonable discussion than a bunch of thin-veiled whining about how it will affect our torrents.

ameister14 7y ago
I have, yes. However, I don't believe it's always necessary to have experience doing something in order to understand how it works - humans developed pretty well in ways to enable us to share experience with one another. Anyway, as I see it first we should agree on what exactly the problem is; in this case, it appears this was created to solve the problem of mass shootings in schools. If that is the problem, this solution goes well beyond what is necessary to solve it. Further, it remains to be seen whether this solution actually works to solve the problem at all. So you have something that might work but definitely does a bunch of unnecessary things. At best, you have an incredibly inefficient solution and at worst something that actively harms people.
- panzagl 7y ago
  How does it go beyond? The systems discussed either grab public social media, or monitor information created on the schools' machines. I don't know that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy on either.
  - ameister14 7y ago
    First, I'd say monitoring profanity, the word 'gay,' mentions of drugs and sex, etc. does not have bearing on the primary issue at hand: gun violence. If you can outline for me how giving a student body principal information on a student setting up a dating profile serves to solve the issue of mass shootings, I'd appreciate it. Second, the systems discussed pull information from student's phones and directly monitor communication using school email addresses. The former is an issue for obvious reasons and the latter is an issue because you actually should have a reasonable expectation of private communication through mail. The fact that it is possible for the school to read your mail is immaterial. It is possible for the government to read your mail. The government does not get to do so, despite the many, many crimes committed through the mail and by people that receive mail.

faissaloo 7y ago

I was (and still am) against the monitoring, restriction and limiting of student devices at school. I find it deeply disturbing that children are going to be monitored when they aren't even on school grounds, it's nightmarish. Every day homeschooling my future children looks exponentially better.

vangelis 7y ago

I figure the psychological damage will create even more school shooters. shrug

manfredo 7y ago

I was the type of high school student that would deliberately spam profanity and other things that would trigger this system just to spite the administrators. Privacy through obfuscation: when alarm bell rings all the time then the alarm bell becomes meaningless.

atoav 7y ago

Teach them early that we don’t live in free societies any more. How else would you go about building tomorrow’s distopia? We actually need the opposite: we need schools that create educated, crtically thinking individuals that don’t hessitate to work together for thw future.

Avamander 7y ago

I think this is just a strategy for moving the Overton window. "Look what we can do! Instead we opted in for this [vendor] MITM proxy and cameras in each classroom that snoop on your kids' activities! Much less invasive ;)"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

shapiro1 7y ago

I bullied a kid in middle school to the point where he switched classes. Teachers didn’t panick and kick me out, rather they listened to both sides and let us figure it out. We talked and became really good friends, even to this day! Humans aren’t perfect. I’m not saying bullying is good, but the best solution is not to punishment. I’d certainly spiral out of control and become a monster had I been kicked out. Scandinavian pedagogy is great!