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"The local Brazosport Independent School District had recently hired a company called Social Sentinel to monitor public posts from all users, including adults,

• 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
        > It's kinda crazy. We say this - but I suspect we are a minority. I'm not sure I agree there. For example, I've heard stories where parents don't really want their children to use Instagram... however, they also don't want their kids to be excluded. If all other kids are on Instagram, the parents don't want their child to be excluded. It's kind of a trap if all parents feel this way. I've heard stories of those parents getting together and collectively agreeing that they will all simultaneously ban their children from using Instagram so that no one feels excluded. So in your example of "we"... it could be that "we" all feel this way, but we need to raise our voices together instead of as individuals.
      • xfitm3 7y ago
        I believe we’re witnessing fear mongering at work.
      • Silhouette 7y ago
        Are we the strange ones? If it's all about numbers alone, we might be... A lot of it is ignorance, I think, not in a derogatory sense but simply not understanding the nature of the technologies now being used, the potential consequences if they are abused or defective, and the other possibilities that might improve the situation. Not everyone is or wants to be a technical expert. Unfortunately, that includes the politicians and lawyers and regulators who are generally charged with helping average people to avoid complex threats they don't understand and can't effectively defend against themselves. The problem is that in this case, there are also strong motivations for some powerful groups that do understand these technologies to exploit them, from making more profit for big tech businesses to increasing the powers of state intelligence agencies to intrude into ordinary people's lives. Rather ironically, these data-gathering organisations also tend to be unable to see the bigger picture, and without any similarly powerful organisations to challenge aspects of the technology that might be less desirable, politicians just hear about economic growth or better security or whatever other headline benefit, while the steady erosion of everyone's basic rights and freedoms continues.
    • Silhouette 7y ago
      What are we doing to ourselves and our kids? My instinctive reaction whenever I hear the phrase "think of the children" these days is along the lines of "I am thinking of the children, and I don't want them to have to grow up in the world you are trying to create, which is why I disagree with what you're doing".
    • analog31 7y ago
      Chipping in my nickel here... I believe that my life as a kid was easier than what my own kids have now. It was less cutthroat, more forgiving, more free in terms of having chances to learn and explore things on my own. Some of the reasons are inflicted by society and technology, some doubtlessly by their parents (including me). Stats on things like depression and suicide might reflect this, don't know enough of the details to say for sure. I don't think my parents felt the same way.
• 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.