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Schools are using unproven surveillance technology to monitor students

178 points by howard941 7y ago

Evidlo 7y ago
Most people only attend a single high school. What qualifies anyone to speak about how most US schools are, much less compare student experience between US and European ones? There's too many comments here that are just conjecture.
adamnemecek 7y ago
US students (general population as well) are way more stressed than students in other countries. Like way, way, way more stressed. People respond to prolonged stress with aggression. Instead of doing surveillance, maybe think about ways to reduce student stress. E.g. in Austria, the school is legally required to provide a day between two major tests (IIRC). In the US, lol, finals are crammed into like 3 days where you have major papers/projects due as well, so like 6 major things due in like 3 days is normal. Maybe school is just supposed to prepare from being managed inefficiently.
- 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
  The culture in many US schools is an adversarial mess where the teachers, administration, and students are in constant conflict over things that should be non-issues. There's often a sense that the primary purpose of school is to grind down any resistance to authority. Comparisons between school and prison aren't typical, but they're certainly not unheard of. Some schools have been known to lock/chain all side/rear exits during the school day to stop students from sneaking out (generally in blatant violation of fire code). Multiple school districts have had to settle lawsuits related to students being strip-searched. In this culture the kind of system described by the article wasn't just predictable, it was utterly inevitable.
  - peterlk 7y ago
    I grew up viewing school as prison. I was part of a program in elementary school which meant that I traveled to other schools regularly. My elementary and high schools were quite nice, but my middle school and the schools that I traveled to were very prison-like. The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing. Using the bathroom required permission that was often denied. Peeing between classes often meant penalties for being tardy (in middle/high school where you had 5 minutes to get between classes which may be a 4 minute walk apart, and teachers always had that one last thing to say). My middle school banned shoelaces for a while because of gang violence. I had a Spanish teacher who regularly handed out negative grades on tests (your grade would have been better if you hadn't showed up and taken a 0 on the test). I had a different spanish teacher who took it upon herself to regularly humiliate students who were doing poorly and lecture us about how we could never expect to get anywhere in life. It wasn't all bad. I had a fantastic chemistry teacher and a great physics teacher. But there was a lot of bad.
    - maxxxxx 7y ago
      "The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing." That's one thing I don't get in the US. The schools really look like prisons. Why not have windows and daylight?
      - noodlesUK 7y ago
        I don’t know, but a lot of public sector buildings seem to be built in this way. Looming monolithic structures with little to no natural light, and grimy linoleum flooring. Visit your local city hall or similar. It’s weird because I’ve not experienced the same in the UK, where government buildings are usually (ignoring the beautiful historic ones) built more like any other modern office.
        mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Much of the the US was built up in the 1960s. Architecture was brutal and hasn’t aged well.
      - 7y ago
  - noodlesUK 7y ago
    There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young people have no longer got any rights. For most cases your barometer for treating children ought to be “would I as an adult be okay being treated this way”. Children need more protection than adults, not less. Schools should be a place where children feel safe, not a place where they feel locked up. It’s no surprise that there’s a school-to-prison pipeline in the US when some schools resemble prisons so closely.
    - adamnemecek 7y ago
      I wonder if this might be a result of architectonic decisions. What if the architecture of the school made people in it behave more prison-like? I think that another aspect of the us school system is the stampede during the breaks. Too many people moving at once.
    - qball 7y ago
      >There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young people have no longer got any rights. Segregation happened. Much like racial divides, it's easier to see people you aren't exposed to on a daily basis as something less than human. That, and when people are expected to be less than human, they start acting like it (the lack of opportunity for personal development directly delays when it happens). Children, of course, have it worse, because they don't know (and some never really figure it out) that they're getting screwed; the foundation of fighting for rights is knowing you should have them in the first place. And while there may have been a good reason for this in the past (1910s industry was very far from being a pleasant place to work), safety regulations and the increased number of service/knowledge jobs relative to the more unpleasant ones (as well as safety regulations where applicable) as well as increased automation would make workplace apprenticeship programs much more viable. The political will (of the people who have rights) can't be changed unless they see those who they oppress like themselves, and showing that they can accomplish objectively useful things (not schoolwork) is a good way to do that. Of course, the very task of creating programs that make children useful is significant, and we figure that school isn't that unpleasant for most, so [corporate humanity] will do nothing to change their status. We won't teach the children dissatisfied by the current system that there's something they can do about it either, because that would destabilize the system as it stands. >Schools should be a place where children feel safe, not a place where they feel locked up. The two are much more similar than you realize. The feeling of being locked up directly stems from the complete elimination of risk (i.e. the feeling of safety). And a school with no playground and no technical subjects where students are seen and not heard is a perfectly safe place, much like societies where the concept of risk is antithetical to the concept that individuals only exist to serve said society tend to have less violence but never actually prosper. Development requires risk.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > People respond to prolonged stress with aggression. Instead of doing surveillance, maybe think about ways to reduce student stress. I for one would be stressed even more if I had a camera behind me when in classroom. Similarly in the office. At my last job, the mere passing remark about possibility of installing cameras was met with "you do this, we walk right out and don't come back".
- BeetleB 7y ago
  >US students (general population as well) are way more stressed than students in other countries. And way, way less than in other countries. In plenty of countries people take a set of exams that covers two years worth of education (e.g. the physics exam is two years worth of physics education). And then they do it again 2 years later (first set of exams is after the 10th grade, second set after the 12th). Both these exams are a major determinant of your future university admissions. And then there are countries where there are too many students and too few universities. Kids will study all day and nights. I knew one high school student who was not allowed to leave his house for at least a month prior and during the exams. It paid off. He got into a good university. And while not everyone who got in studied as hard as he did, many did - he was not an outlier. Many people need to study like crazy just for a chance to get into any accredited university. If you're OK going to a regular state university, and not necessarily a top ranked one, life is easy in the US. You don't need a fantastic GPA, and you don't need a fantastic SAT score. An above average GPA in the US does not mean you'll never get a university education. Getting appendicitis in the middle of the big exams (you know, the one that covers 2 years of material)[1] is not a major determinant of your life. [1] Actually happened to someone I know. Didn't hurt him too much as his family had money to send him to a US-like country.
dgzl 7y ago
This was being praised on NPR recently. The young host was ecstatically talking about how the CEO of some company says "we kinda gave up our rights to privacy with the digital age", and that these surveillance measures are able to spot trouble students. The host then talked himself into making the comparison between this activity and how Russia treats surveillance, and confusedly asking his guest "wait, we're not like the Russians are we? That can't be right..." After some interaction, the host was eager to talk about the programs again. Why are people so willing to give up their rights?
- adamnemecek 7y ago
  > Why are people so willing to give up their rights? Students have no rights. I find it despicable but it's a fact.
  - dgzl 7y ago
    Children do have rights. And the parent is waiving their children's rights by putting them in garbage public school.
    - adamnemecek 7y ago
      It's not about public vs private.
    - b_tterc_p 7y ago
      Or, you know, can’t afford the massive cost of private school or timesink of homeschooling?
    - a1369209993 7y ago
      If someone other than the child can waive those rights, then they never had rights[0] in the first place. 0: Or, more pedantically, the rights that are inalienable to them by virtue of being a person were never not violated. Or, more comprehendibly, they never had acknowledgement and enforcement[1] of those rights by the legal system. 1: I assume "children do have [acknowledgement and enforcement of their preexisting] rights" is what dgzl intended to convey.
phpdragon 7y ago
As a former teacher I 100% support surveillance (hopefully video) monitoring in the classroom. Parents need to see first-hand how bad student behavior can get.
- arkades 7y ago
  In both directions. The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value. Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. *In the US. My own school experience in Europe could not have been more different than what you describe. When looking for a solution, we should not forget about places that have (or had) good school systems.
    - ksdale 7y ago
      It seems... wrong to reduce this to a U.S. and Europe dichotomy, there are a lot of great schools in the U.S. and I assume there are bad ones in Europe as well.
      - deogeo 7y ago
        Sorry, I did not mean to imply that. Just that school is not inherently terrible. After all, I can only vouch for a few schools in one country in Europe. And that's outdated info - I hear things have been slowly getting worse here as well. Edit: Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood. Some statistics could clear things up...
b_tterc_p 7y ago
While the cameras in the article seem to run on some stupid software that doesn’t help, I don’t think I would have cared as a student about cameras in general. In fact I may have appreciated the fact that cameras mean the teachers can’t get away with the privilege of being more trustworthy than the kids. Catching cheaters would be nice. Catching bullies would be nice. Reducing the rate of false sexual assault claims and actual sexual assault (my year had one of each teacher:student). But... it probably opens doors to worse things. Dumb cameras would be good. Smart cameras would be bad. As would software run over the dumb cameras.
- tsss 7y ago
  You seriously believe there wouldn't have been a "technical problem" if it saves the teachers or school some trouble?
  - b_tterc_p 7y ago
    Sometimes but probably less than the majority of incidents for a fixed static camera system feels appropriate. Not to mention deterrent effects.
  - metildaa 7y ago
    When teachers and administrators are the only one with access to the camera system, they can choose to look the other way and use the panopticon of surveillance only on the students. Meanwhile, the disempowered students can complain all they want, which will just encourage administrators to crack down more using their new camera system.
0xcde4c3db 7y ago
> Asked whether his algorithms could prevent a mass shooting, van der Vorst said: “I wouldn’t claim that we could prevent a crazy loony from shooting people.” Call me a crazy loony, but I think someone who would phrase it that way isn't on the same planet as taking the problem space seriously.
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  It seems to be working. The sane people have stopped shooting up groups of strangers and now only the crazy loonies are left, as one can plainly see from their interviews, social media posts etc
  - craftyguy 7y ago
    I don't think that's the point. The person in the quote probably has no idea what motivates people to do this, and they clearly have no desire to want to understand it if they're quick to dismiss them as 'crazy loonies' (hint: understanding motivation, etc is key to prevention, not "identifying all the loonies" or whatever they seem to be suggesting..)
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    When were sane people shooting up schools? What makes recent shooters insane?
- rhizome 7y ago
  Because taking the problem seriously isn't the point of their participation. Computer recognition of the natural world does not work without training and human confirmation/QA, and they aren't going to train each individual installation on corpuses derived from each individual school because that would eat their profits. It's all a scam, the only reason anybody's even talking to them is because they're using tax dollars as free R&D funding and calling it "progress."
- sailfast 7y ago
  He’s Dutch. This statement sounds about right to me given that country’s understanding of these events, and that’s how they view them. All that said: They made the software to stop bar fights in Groningen, not to stop shootings. I don’t really understand why this is being framed as a school shooting deterrent.
thoughtstheseus 7y ago
What if a kid does not want to be constantly recorded?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- qball 7y ago
  Who cares what unpersons think?
- ganzuul 7y ago
  They can skip school.
ddingus 7y ago
All I know is I would very likely be in jail in the school environment today. How did it get so damn authoritarian?
apo 7y ago
It's a little surprising that this article approaches the issue from the perspective of the gizmo working, rather than ever-widening surveillance. Imagine that some automated surveillance technology proved itself to be 100% effective at spotting aggressive behavior. The only catch is that it records, with perfect fidelity every sneeze, cough, conversation, and laugh in a way that uniquely associates each instance to an individual. Part of the efficacy requires all audio and personal identification to be stored in a giant database. Should such a technology be deployed in US public schools?
- astazangasta 7y ago
  No. Surveillance is a bad by itself. I don't want a social model where morality is the product of fear. I don't believe in authoritarian virtues; they will inherently lead to aggression and violence themselves.
threwawasy1228 7y ago
When I was in school they would monitor everything that you did on the computer and then when the students attempted to get around the blocks with simple proxies, they would have to get new proxies each day as they were banned. I personally was one of the people who was supplying new proxies to students at the school, and they went after me taking away my ability to connect to the internet using my login for the remaining years of my high school experience. I eventually had to use other peoples logins (with their permission of course) to be able to continue using the computers at the school. All this is to say, if you try to create a surveillance system at any given school, kids will find a way to not engage with it or fight back if they are able. People in the discussion below aren't giving the kids enough credit to stand up for themselves.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  I found it ridiculous that we had search keyword monitoring that prevented researching the Ku Klux Klan which we had to study in history.
  - threwawasy1228 7y ago
    That was by far the worst part, when your keyword search got you called to the deans office. Never happened to me, but this one kid I knew got grilled by the dean and a police officer because of his search history once. If I remember correctly he had googled "DeathBomb Arc" which is the name of a record label[0] in order to look up when a band he liked was touring. The dean and the police officer repeatedly refused to believe that he wasn't up to something. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathbomb_Arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathbomb_Arc
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Yes but cameras and microphones are different than network monitoring. The monitoring of computers is individualized, whereas cameras monitor groups. It might seem minor to some, but the presence of cameras in british schools is really changing things for the good. American schools use cameras to look into crimes. They are not generally accessible immediately by teachers, but many British schools now have very elaborate camera systems designed for immediate use. When two kids get into a fight there is little debate about who started it. Teachers can, within minutes, have the footage on a tablet at their desk. Having that unbiased video evidence immediately at hand radically changes bullying prevention. Some kids and most parents may not like cameras, but that kid who is afraid for his or her physical safety wants those cameras working. Microphones are a more sensitive issue, but I could see them being equally effective in addressing harassment. They would need different protections, perhaps a 30min recording limit, but there is potential.
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
You could prevent actual shootings for a lot less money by sending out a letter to parents asking about how secure their guns at home are.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  That would cause a firestorm of complaints I’m sure. It seems reasonable but the issue is toxic.
- celeritascelery 7y ago
  Are most school shootings by fellow students? I was under the impression that was not the case.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    It seems like a lot are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
bombom 7y ago
In my school they also monitor everything.. so that's not a new thing.
bin0 7y ago
This is a crazy idea. Even if they worked, this would be a bad one. Most kids who get angry and aggressive never shoot up a school over it, and all this will result in is a bunch of kids who get in arguments being hauled in front of the cops and being interrogated about "where is the gun, and what day are you doing it?". This applies to the whole "report suspicious behavior" thing too. Most of the time, when a kid is acting like an edgy teen he's just... being an edgy teen. I don't like the whole spanish inquisition rat-out-your-buddy direction this thing is taking.
JetezLeLogin 7y ago
All this - being spied on 100% of the time - ostensibly to prevent something that has about a 1 in 600,000,000 chance of happening to you, ever. Oh but it must be a real and ever-present danger - I saw it on the news! By that logic we should have facial recognition too, just to make sure JLo doesn't walk in. She's been all over the news for 20 years, so it must be an epidemic. The critique in this article focuses on technological unreliability without addressing the profound wrongheadedness of the idea in the first place. Perhaps that's been discussed plenty elsewhere, but I for one could stand to have that part of the critique repeated ad infinitum until it sinks in.
- bagels 7y ago
  The probability is orders of magnitude larger than this. https://medium.com/@hellodonavon/what-are-the-chances-of-your-child-being-in-a-school-shooting-df2073f8b86b https://medium.com/@hellodonavon/what-are-the-chances-of-you...
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    1.5% lifetime chance of attending a school with a shooting. that's a super wide net. We almost all have friends who have been murdered or died in car accidents or cancer. 1.5% of merely knowing someone in a school shooting is tiny.
    - bagels 7y ago
      1/600,000,000 was made up and wrong, sorry
  - deogeo 7y ago
    What an utterly garbage article. "what are the chances that your child’s school will be in a shooting at some point in their life"? Why ask such an irrelevant, convoluted question* , instead of the obvious: what are you child's chances of being killed in a school shooting? Because it turns out the chance for that is 1 in 35 thousand (per lifetime, not per year) [1] [1] Using 118 school shooting deaths/year from 2018, which was the worst year ever, according to https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46507514 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46507514, 13.41 mean years of schooling from http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=242 http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=242, and 78.69 years life expectancy. * Of course we all know why - because the author doesn't hesitate to mislead with creative statistics to push an agenda. Edit, to add some context and explanation: Using mean_years_of_schooling/life_expectancy to get an estimate on the number of students in the USA. Now the chance of being killed in any homicide, in the same period of time as mean years of schooling, is 1 in 1400. 25-times larger. And homicides aren't close to the biggest killer: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA-vs.-media-coverage.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-i...
Nasrudith 7y ago
One thing I don't get is why the hell so many people's definition of 'good child development' involves setting up dystopias that only a few decades ago would have been panned as heavy handed and unrealistic.
atoav 7y ago
As a sidenote, most surveillance technology is unproven, at least in the sense — that there is no good scientific proof for increased security by using it. I believe most surveillance tecchnology is better suited for ass covering/acountability than for any real increase of security and safety. This is the difference between stopping something from happening vs figuring out afterwards what caused it.
olodus 7y ago
It isn't very weird that these smart surveillance thingys go off on the wrong things. What do they have to train those AI? They can't have that many "sound bites" from actual school shootings right? Maybe they actually have some but probably not enough to train a reliable AI on imo. I wonder how they did to create more data. Did they hire some actors and tried to create some "aggressive noises" themselves? I really wanted the journalists to ask the companies this.
xnLAP 7y ago
School has always served the purpose of indoctrinating students to be compliant government slaves. When men were still cannon fodder, they were indoctrinated with Caesar and Socrates. In our hedonistic brave new world, what is better than getting the slaves used to perpetual surveillance from an early age.

178 points by howard941 7y ago

Most people only attend a single high school. What qualifies anyone to speak about how most US schools are, much less compare student experience between US and European ones? There's too many comments here that are just conjecture.

adamnemecek 7y ago

US students (general population as well) are way more stressed than students in other countries. Like way, way, way more stressed. People respond to prolonged stress with aggression. Instead of doing surveillance, maybe think about ways to reduce student stress. E.g. in Austria, the school is legally required to provide a day between two major tests (IIRC). In the US, lol, finals are crammed into like 3 days where you have major papers/projects due as well, so like 6 major things due in like 3 days is normal. Maybe school is just supposed to prepare from being managed inefficiently.

0xcde4c3db 7y ago
The culture in many US schools is an adversarial mess where the teachers, administration, and students are in constant conflict over things that should be non-issues. There's often a sense that the primary purpose of school is to grind down any resistance to authority. Comparisons between school and prison aren't typical, but they're certainly not unheard of. Some schools have been known to lock/chain all side/rear exits during the school day to stop students from sneaking out (generally in blatant violation of fire code). Multiple school districts have had to settle lawsuits related to students being strip-searched. In this culture the kind of system described by the article wasn't just predictable, it was utterly inevitable.
- peterlk 7y ago
  I grew up viewing school as prison. I was part of a program in elementary school which meant that I traveled to other schools regularly. My elementary and high schools were quite nice, but my middle school and the schools that I traveled to were very prison-like. The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing. Using the bathroom required permission that was often denied. Peeing between classes often meant penalties for being tardy (in middle/high school where you had 5 minutes to get between classes which may be a 4 minute walk apart, and teachers always had that one last thing to say). My middle school banned shoelaces for a while because of gang violence. I had a Spanish teacher who regularly handed out negative grades on tests (your grade would have been better if you hadn't showed up and taken a 0 on the test). I had a different spanish teacher who took it upon herself to regularly humiliate students who were doing poorly and lecture us about how we could never expect to get anywhere in life. It wasn't all bad. I had a fantastic chemistry teacher and a great physics teacher. But there was a lot of bad.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    "The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing." That's one thing I don't get in the US. The schools really look like prisons. Why not have windows and daylight?
    - noodlesUK 7y ago
      I don’t know, but a lot of public sector buildings seem to be built in this way. Looming monolithic structures with little to no natural light, and grimy linoleum flooring. Visit your local city hall or similar. It’s weird because I’ve not experienced the same in the UK, where government buildings are usually (ignoring the beautiful historic ones) built more like any other modern office.
      - mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Much of the the US was built up in the 1960s. Architecture was brutal and hasn’t aged well.
    - 7y ago
- noodlesUK 7y ago
  There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young people have no longer got any rights. For most cases your barometer for treating children ought to be “would I as an adult be okay being treated this way”. Children need more protection than adults, not less. Schools should be a place where children feel safe, not a place where they feel locked up. It’s no surprise that there’s a school-to-prison pipeline in the US when some schools resemble prisons so closely.
  - adamnemecek 7y ago
    I wonder if this might be a result of architectonic decisions. What if the architecture of the school made people in it behave more prison-like? I think that another aspect of the us school system is the stampede during the breaks. Too many people moving at once.
  - qball 7y ago
    >There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young people have no longer got any rights. Segregation happened. Much like racial divides, it's easier to see people you aren't exposed to on a daily basis as something less than human. That, and when people are expected to be less than human, they start acting like it (the lack of opportunity for personal development directly delays when it happens). Children, of course, have it worse, because they don't know (and some never really figure it out) that they're getting screwed; the foundation of fighting for rights is knowing you should have them in the first place. And while there may have been a good reason for this in the past (1910s industry was very far from being a pleasant place to work), safety regulations and the increased number of service/knowledge jobs relative to the more unpleasant ones (as well as safety regulations where applicable) as well as increased automation would make workplace apprenticeship programs much more viable. The political will (of the people who have rights) can't be changed unless they see those who they oppress like themselves, and showing that they can accomplish objectively useful things (not schoolwork) is a good way to do that. Of course, the very task of creating programs that make children useful is significant, and we figure that school isn't that unpleasant for most, so [corporate humanity] will do nothing to change their status. We won't teach the children dissatisfied by the current system that there's something they can do about it either, because that would destabilize the system as it stands. >Schools should be a place where children feel safe, not a place where they feel locked up. The two are much more similar than you realize. The feeling of being locked up directly stems from the complete elimination of risk (i.e. the feeling of safety). And a school with no playground and no technical subjects where students are seen and not heard is a perfectly safe place, much like societies where the concept of risk is antithetical to the concept that individuals only exist to serve said society tend to have less violence but never actually prosper. Development requires risk.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> People respond to prolonged stress with aggression. Instead of doing surveillance, maybe think about ways to reduce student stress. I for one would be stressed even more if I had a camera behind me when in classroom. Similarly in the office. At my last job, the mere passing remark about possibility of installing cameras was met with "you do this, we walk right out and don't come back".
BeetleB 7y ago
>US students (general population as well) are way more stressed than students in other countries. And way, way less than in other countries. In plenty of countries people take a set of exams that covers two years worth of education (e.g. the physics exam is two years worth of physics education). And then they do it again 2 years later (first set of exams is after the 10th grade, second set after the 12th). Both these exams are a major determinant of your future university admissions. And then there are countries where there are too many students and too few universities. Kids will study all day and nights. I knew one high school student who was not allowed to leave his house for at least a month prior and during the exams. It paid off. He got into a good university. And while not everyone who got in studied as hard as he did, many did - he was not an outlier. Many people need to study like crazy just for a chance to get into any accredited university. If you're OK going to a regular state university, and not necessarily a top ranked one, life is easy in the US. You don't need a fantastic GPA, and you don't need a fantastic SAT score. An above average GPA in the US does not mean you'll never get a university education. Getting appendicitis in the middle of the big exams (you know, the one that covers 2 years of material)[1] is not a major determinant of your life. [1] Actually happened to someone I know. Didn't hurt him too much as his family had money to send him to a US-like country.

dgzl 7y ago

This was being praised on NPR recently. The young host was ecstatically talking about how the CEO of some company says "we kinda gave up our rights to privacy with the digital age", and that these surveillance measures are able to spot trouble students. The host then talked himself into making the comparison between this activity and how Russia treats surveillance, and confusedly asking his guest "wait, we're not like the Russians are we? That can't be right..." After some interaction, the host was eager to talk about the programs again. Why are people so willing to give up their rights?

adamnemecek 7y ago
> Why are people so willing to give up their rights? Students have no rights. I find it despicable but it's a fact.
- dgzl 7y ago
  Children do have rights. And the parent is waiving their children's rights by putting them in garbage public school.
  - adamnemecek 7y ago
    It's not about public vs private.
  - b_tterc_p 7y ago
    Or, you know, can’t afford the massive cost of private school or timesink of homeschooling?
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    If someone other than the child can waive those rights, then they never had rights[0] in the first place. 0: Or, more pedantically, the rights that are inalienable to them by virtue of being a person were never not violated. Or, more comprehendibly, they never had acknowledgement and enforcement[1] of those rights by the legal system. 1: I assume "children do have [acknowledgement and enforcement of their preexisting] rights" is what dgzl intended to convey.

phpdragon 7y ago

As a former teacher I 100% support surveillance (hopefully video) monitoring in the classroom. Parents need to see first-hand how bad student behavior can get.

arkades 7y ago
In both directions. The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value. Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.
- deogeo 7y ago
  > Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. *In the US. My own school experience in Europe could not have been more different than what you describe. When looking for a solution, we should not forget about places that have (or had) good school systems.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    It seems... wrong to reduce this to a U.S. and Europe dichotomy, there are a lot of great schools in the U.S. and I assume there are bad ones in Europe as well.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      Sorry, I did not mean to imply that. Just that school is not inherently terrible. After all, I can only vouch for a few schools in one country in Europe. And that's outdated info - I hear things have been slowly getting worse here as well. Edit: Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood. Some statistics could clear things up...

b_tterc_p 7y ago

While the cameras in the article seem to run on some stupid software that doesn’t help, I don’t think I would have cared as a student about cameras in general. In fact I may have appreciated the fact that cameras mean the teachers can’t get away with the privilege of being more trustworthy than the kids. Catching cheaters would be nice. Catching bullies would be nice. Reducing the rate of false sexual assault claims and actual sexual assault (my year had one of each teacher:student). But... it probably opens doors to worse things. Dumb cameras would be good. Smart cameras would be bad. As would software run over the dumb cameras.

tsss 7y ago
You seriously believe there wouldn't have been a "technical problem" if it saves the teachers or school some trouble?
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  Sometimes but probably less than the majority of incidents for a fixed static camera system feels appropriate. Not to mention deterrent effects.
- metildaa 7y ago
  When teachers and administrators are the only one with access to the camera system, they can choose to look the other way and use the panopticon of surveillance only on the students. Meanwhile, the disempowered students can complain all they want, which will just encourage administrators to crack down more using their new camera system.

0xcde4c3db 7y ago

> Asked whether his algorithms could prevent a mass shooting, van der Vorst said: “I wouldn’t claim that we could prevent a crazy loony from shooting people.” Call me a crazy loony, but I think someone who would phrase it that way isn't on the same planet as taking the problem space seriously.

xkcd-sucks 7y ago
It seems to be working. The sane people have stopped shooting up groups of strangers and now only the crazy loonies are left, as one can plainly see from their interviews, social media posts etc
- craftyguy 7y ago
  I don't think that's the point. The person in the quote probably has no idea what motivates people to do this, and they clearly have no desire to want to understand it if they're quick to dismiss them as 'crazy loonies' (hint: understanding motivation, etc is key to prevention, not "identifying all the loonies" or whatever they seem to be suggesting..)
- lonelappde 7y ago
  When were sane people shooting up schools? What makes recent shooters insane?
rhizome 7y ago
Because taking the problem seriously isn't the point of their participation. Computer recognition of the natural world does not work without training and human confirmation/QA, and they aren't going to train each individual installation on corpuses derived from each individual school because that would eat their profits. It's all a scam, the only reason anybody's even talking to them is because they're using tax dollars as free R&D funding and calling it "progress."
sailfast 7y ago
He’s Dutch. This statement sounds about right to me given that country’s understanding of these events, and that’s how they view them. All that said: They made the software to stop bar fights in Groningen, not to stop shootings. I don’t really understand why this is being framed as a school shooting deterrent.

thoughtstheseus 7y ago

What if a kid does not want to be constantly recorded?

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qball 7y ago
Who cares what unpersons think?
ganzuul 7y ago
They can skip school.

ddingus 7y ago

All I know is I would very likely be in jail in the school environment today. How did it get so damn authoritarian?

apo 7y ago

It's a little surprising that this article approaches the issue from the perspective of the gizmo working, rather than ever-widening surveillance. Imagine that some automated surveillance technology proved itself to be 100% effective at spotting aggressive behavior. The only catch is that it records, with perfect fidelity every sneeze, cough, conversation, and laugh in a way that uniquely associates each instance to an individual. Part of the efficacy requires all audio and personal identification to be stored in a giant database. Should such a technology be deployed in US public schools?

astazangasta 7y ago
No. Surveillance is a bad by itself. I don't want a social model where morality is the product of fear. I don't believe in authoritarian virtues; they will inherently lead to aggression and violence themselves.

threwawasy1228 7y ago

When I was in school they would monitor everything that you did on the computer and then when the students attempted to get around the blocks with simple proxies, they would have to get new proxies each day as they were banned. I personally was one of the people who was supplying new proxies to students at the school, and they went after me taking away my ability to connect to the internet using my login for the remaining years of my high school experience. I eventually had to use other peoples logins (with their permission of course) to be able to continue using the computers at the school. All this is to say, if you try to create a surveillance system at any given school, kids will find a way to not engage with it or fight back if they are able. People in the discussion below aren't giving the kids enough credit to stand up for themselves.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
I found it ridiculous that we had search keyword monitoring that prevented researching the Ku Klux Klan which we had to study in history.
- threwawasy1228 7y ago
  That was by far the worst part, when your keyword search got you called to the deans office. Never happened to me, but this one kid I knew got grilled by the dean and a police officer because of his search history once. If I remember correctly he had googled "DeathBomb Arc" which is the name of a record label[0] in order to look up when a band he liked was touring. The dean and the police officer repeatedly refused to believe that he wasn't up to something. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathbomb_Arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathbomb_Arc
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sandworm101 7y ago
Yes but cameras and microphones are different than network monitoring. The monitoring of computers is individualized, whereas cameras monitor groups. It might seem minor to some, but the presence of cameras in british schools is really changing things for the good. American schools use cameras to look into crimes. They are not generally accessible immediately by teachers, but many British schools now have very elaborate camera systems designed for immediate use. When two kids get into a fight there is little debate about who started it. Teachers can, within minutes, have the footage on a tablet at their desk. Having that unbiased video evidence immediately at hand radically changes bullying prevention. Some kids and most parents may not like cameras, but that kid who is afraid for his or her physical safety wants those cameras working. Microphones are a more sensitive issue, but I could see them being equally effective in addressing harassment. They would need different protections, perhaps a 30min recording limit, but there is potential.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

You could prevent actual shootings for a lot less money by sending out a letter to parents asking about how secure their guns at home are.

lostlogin 7y ago
That would cause a firestorm of complaints I’m sure. It seems reasonable but the issue is toxic.
celeritascelery 7y ago
Are most school shootings by fellow students? I was under the impression that was not the case.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  It seems like a lot are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

bombom 7y ago

In my school they also monitor everything.. so that's not a new thing.

bin0 7y ago

This is a crazy idea. Even if they worked, this would be a bad one. Most kids who get angry and aggressive never shoot up a school over it, and all this will result in is a bunch of kids who get in arguments being hauled in front of the cops and being interrogated about "where is the gun, and what day are you doing it?". This applies to the whole "report suspicious behavior" thing too. Most of the time, when a kid is acting like an edgy teen he's just... being an edgy teen. I don't like the whole spanish inquisition rat-out-your-buddy direction this thing is taking.

JetezLeLogin 7y ago

All this - being spied on 100% of the time - ostensibly to prevent something that has about a 1 in 600,000,000 chance of happening to you, ever. Oh but it must be a real and ever-present danger - I saw it on the news! By that logic we should have facial recognition too, just to make sure JLo doesn't walk in. She's been all over the news for 20 years, so it must be an epidemic. The critique in this article focuses on technological unreliability without addressing the profound wrongheadedness of the idea in the first place. Perhaps that's been discussed plenty elsewhere, but I for one could stand to have that part of the critique repeated ad infinitum until it sinks in.

bagels 7y ago
The probability is orders of magnitude larger than this. https://medium.com/@hellodonavon/what-are-the-chances-of-your-child-being-in-a-school-shooting-df2073f8b86b https://medium.com/@hellodonavon/what-are-the-chances-of-you...
- lonelappde 7y ago
  1.5% lifetime chance of attending a school with a shooting. that's a super wide net. We almost all have friends who have been murdered or died in car accidents or cancer. 1.5% of merely knowing someone in a school shooting is tiny.
  - bagels 7y ago
    1/600,000,000 was made up and wrong, sorry
- deogeo 7y ago
  What an utterly garbage article. "what are the chances that your child’s school will be in a shooting at some point in their life"? Why ask such an irrelevant, convoluted question* , instead of the obvious: what are you child's chances of being killed in a school shooting? Because it turns out the chance for that is 1 in 35 thousand (per lifetime, not per year) [1] [1] Using 118 school shooting deaths/year from 2018, which was the worst year ever, according to https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46507514 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46507514, 13.41 mean years of schooling from http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=242 http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=242, and 78.69 years life expectancy. * Of course we all know why - because the author doesn't hesitate to mislead with creative statistics to push an agenda. Edit, to add some context and explanation: Using mean_years_of_schooling/life_expectancy to get an estimate on the number of students in the USA. Now the chance of being killed in any homicide, in the same period of time as mean years of schooling, is 1 in 1400. 25-times larger. And homicides aren't close to the biggest killer: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA-vs.-media-coverage.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-i...

Nasrudith 7y ago

One thing I don't get is why the hell so many people's definition of 'good child development' involves setting up dystopias that only a few decades ago would have been panned as heavy handed and unrealistic.

atoav 7y ago

As a sidenote, most surveillance technology is unproven, at least in the sense — that there is no good scientific proof for increased security by using it. I believe most surveillance tecchnology is better suited for ass covering/acountability than for any real increase of security and safety. This is the difference between stopping something from happening vs figuring out afterwards what caused it.

olodus 7y ago

It isn't very weird that these smart surveillance thingys go off on the wrong things. What do they have to train those AI? They can't have that many "sound bites" from actual school shootings right? Maybe they actually have some but probably not enough to train a reliable AI on imo. I wonder how they did to create more data. Did they hire some actors and tried to create some "aggressive noises" themselves? I really wanted the journalists to ask the companies this.

xnLAP 7y ago

School has always served the purpose of indoctrinating students to be compliant government slaves. When men were still cannon fodder, they were indoctrinated with Caesar and Socrates. In our hedonistic brave new world, what is better than getting the slaves used to perpetual surveillance from an early age.