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This is completely absurd and I'm convinced it solves zero problems. The kids don't know they're being spied on until they do something "wrong". Gaggle (a terri

This is completely absurd and I'm convinced it solves zero problems. The kids don't know they're being spied on until they do something "wrong". Gaggle (a terrible name btw) claim they prevent suicides and school shootings. This might "work" at first until kids know they are being spied on. Now they know not to send an email saying "I'm going to kill people". All your doing is preventing communication using school provided technology and eroding students trust in the school. You're not actually preventing a shooting. Kids can still do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do to stop it. On top of that they monitor for profanity. WHY? It doesn't harm anyone and let's people express themselves how they want. If I was a parent I wouldn't want some random people at a for profit company spying on my child. That's my job. Do kids still read 1984?

whydoyoucare 7y ago
Well said. As the article states, it is indeed a solution in wait of a problem. Also don't discount the possibility that the school may have a need to be seen doing something (meaningful or not). 1984 it is indeed.
RealStickman 7y ago
If I were a student and knew about that I'd purposefully put in a variety of words and phrases that might get flagged in every email
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Then you'd be doing a "violation" and get a warning. Presumably some in-school punishment for repeat violations.
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    There's plenty of space for triggering false positives. "I wonder if I'm gay.", "I read that if you drink bleach it could kill you", or just meta "what happens if I put the phrase XYZ here?".
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    Sounds like a good opportunity for a civics lesson. Today's subject: mass civil disobedience.
    - kps 7y ago
      Given the article's description of the company's hiring process, it seems like it would be straightforward for a group of high school students to become ‘Safety Representatives’ and… act creatively.
  - lilott8 7y ago
    In this context, I'd be encouraging my children to do this (and certainly take the blame for them); false positives ftw! It'd be a great, teachable moment where I can discuss many sociological, technological, and ethical issues at once. On top of that I can teach them a thing or two about opsec. The school is really at a loss here for retribution: in many instance the students are required to use the school's equipment for completing assignments and projects. So the worst they can really do is "restrict" usage -- but that isn't really any different than what they already do. So it's a bit of a headache for me and the kid(s)? A small price to pay for demonstrating the hilarious shortcomings of implementing a technological solution to a purely human problem -- one that requires specially trained humans to fix. (Of course I'd make sure the kid(s) give me their blessing before messing with the school) On another note: I have extensive experience working for school districts. This is absolutely a CYA attempt with no foresight into what the outcome of this terrible experiment will be. These solutions tend to be hacked together, easy to circumvent, and poorly implemented. While I have no direct experience with the product mentioned, I do have experience with school-focused solutions. We had to pay the extra money for purely commercial solutions to get anything that was worth the money.
    - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      This is not a false positive, attempts to subvert or sabotage surveillance clearly indicate latent antisocial tendencies and should be punished to the full extent of the law. Please report yourself to the nearest Malcontent Utilization Facility, citizen!
      - swasheck 7y ago
        i got it. not sure why you're being downvoted.
        Uehreka 7y ago
        Hacker News doesn’t like jokes. Or rather, if you’re going to make a joke, it had better be as part of a substantive comment that exists to do more than just tell a joke.
- diabeetusman 7y ago
  Time to do a report on Scunthorpe
  - ironic_ali 7y ago
    Funny story.. back in 2000 a new boss starts at UK govt agency with student focus. This is around University entrance time. He wants to stamp some authority and show he knows better than the last boss. To add some context he was a Londoner in Scotland who obviously knew better than the great unwashed north of the border. Pretty much the first thing he does is look at the flagged words list on incoming emails. Why he felt this level of micromanaging would endear him to his Scottish team is lost to time. Anyway, he snorted and with a smirk berated the admin team for leaving out "cunt" and told them to add it in. The admin team, said nothing and did what they were told and waited.... Over the weekend over 10000 emails were flagged and had to be manually read by the small admin team, who were used to a small amount every week. Our London friend handed his notice in within 6 months :)
    - harimau777 7y ago
      Does the word have a different meaning in Scotland or is it just not considered offensive?
      - ljm 7y ago
        In Scotland, the north of England, and Australia, you'll often hear 'cunt' used as a term of endearment between good friends. It's a banter thing.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  And if I were your parent, I'd seriously look into moving you to a less abusive school.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    In small towns there's often no choice. There's only one high school in Santa Fe.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Yes, this is true. Sometimes doing right for your kids requires a great deal of sacrifice. When my eldest was in primary school in a very small town, they implemented a surveillance system that I (and a lot of other parents) objected greatly to. There was no other school in the area, and home-schooling was not an option for us. It took a year or so, but we resolved the situation by moving to another city.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
Welcome to the modern mentality of alleged criminals being guilty until proven innocent. We have our Bill of Rights for a reason here in America but some lessons are easily forgotten.
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  > We have our Bill of Rights for a reason here in America What's been implicitly added is "For adults only". Whatever the under-18 class of "children" (except when they aren't!) don't have rights.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Exactly. And if you bring up a generation of kids who have been normalized to the idea of constant surveillance and censorship, they're less likely to assert their rights as adults. Many of them will even learn the lesson that surveillance and censorship are good things that save lives. It's insidious and disgusting.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    In many (most? all?) states children are effectively still property. For example, in many states it's legal for parents to steal wages from their children even if their children are high school graduates with a work permit - all based on age. Happened to someone I know. She had a well-paying job but her parents basically stole all the income, naturally making it harder to move out with no savings.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      That's really disturbing that someone's parents would steal their children's money if it's legally acquired.
Terretta 7y ago
I’ve observed “if I were a parent” may be a nonsense phrase. I’m not aware of any parents who still hold the same beliefs across the board as their preconceptions of how they’d think about their kids.
- choward 7y ago
  I knew someone would say this. I almost used "as a parent" instead. Hacker news and the internet in general is full of people making opinions about things they aren't experts in and that's okay. I wonder why parenting is the one that always triggers this kind of response. "You have to be a parent to have an opinion about parenting." What if I had said "if I worked for Gaggle" or "if I was a teacher". Would you have the same response?
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    I think it's a combination of being tired of constantly feeling judged on a very personal part of your life and a feeling that the dependency and inconvince a child, especially a small child, adds to your life is unmatched by almost anything else, giving other little experience to draw from when criticizing or otherwise "trying to help". Even when coming from other parents, unsolicited "advice" can be annoying because every child is different and every parent likes to parent differently.
  - Terretta 7y ago
    I have observed the above re: parent vs. not yet parent. Haven’t observed such a universal perspective shift across other fields of ‘expertise’, nor do those perspectives seem to shift until after more experience, while with parenting it seems to often shift on first realization (“at first sight”). So no, “if I were a teacher” or “if I worked in medicine” and the like don’t seem as likely to be subject to change. // Just to be clear: not saying this as a parent. I am not a parent.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    There needs to be a name for the reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I.e., "You don't have the right piece of paper/you're from the wrong background/insert other personal attack here, therefore you're not qualified to comment." It's an annoying, cheap way to dismiss a perfectly good argument via ad-hominem means rather than actual reasoning.
eagsalazar2 7y ago
Look, I agree 100% this tech is creepy, invasive, and bad but your argument that it doesn't prevent bad behavior (the extreme of which is school shootings) doesn't seem true at face value (honestly I have no idea but neither do you). Yes of course very determined and very smart kids might still get away with it but there is a very good chance it actually does decrease the rate of these incidents significantly. The argument you are making is basically identical to the old "guns don't kill people" argument which actually has been proven completely false. Similarly, minimal suicide prevention measures (like fences on bridges, or again lack of access to guns) while they can usually be circumvented by the extremely determined do usually prevent suicides.
- vageli 7y ago
  > The argument you are making is basically identical to the old "guns don't kill people" argument which actually has been proven completely false. Similarly, minimal suicide prevention measures (like fences on bridges, or again lack of access to guns) while they can usually be circumvented by the extremely determined do usually prevent suicides. How do you measure the efficacy of a fence on a bridge? By the number of suicides by jumping off a bridge or by looking at the suicide numbers in aggregate? Of course it would reduce suicide by jumping but is it actually reducing suicide generally or only a specific method?
  - DanBC 7y ago
    We have a couple of natural experiments. England changed from coal gas to natural gas. That prevented one very common method, and it led to a drop in total suicide rates. It took a while for method substitution to happen. We also saw similar drops when catalytic convertors were added to cars in the UK. One of the important parts of reducing access to means an methods is to cause people to switch to less lethal methods. Removing access to coproxamol (in the UK) saved lives because people switched to other meds. Any overdose is dangerous, but some overdoses are less likely to be lethal if medical attention is sought quickly. England changed the quantities of paracetamol that people could buy. This link only talks about self-poisoning (so it doesn't address the method substitution) but it does talk about characteristics of some people who chose this method: did they go to buy the meds or did they use what was in the home? Were they able to buy large quantities or did the legislation work? What was the length of time between having the initial thought of wanting to overdose and then carrying out the act? http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resparacet.html http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resparacet.html At the moment one of the strongest recommendations we can make for suicide prevention is to reduce access to means and methods, because that has clear evidence to support it. You can hear Professor Nav Kapur talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0&t=415s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0&t=415s The NCISH will probably have more information or links to research about method substitution: https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/ https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/ It's important that removing access to means and methods is not the only thing we do! It's important, but it's only a part of a package of suicide prevention measures. > How do you measure the efficacy of a fence on a bridge? By the number of suicides by jumping off a bridge or by looking at the suicide numbers in aggregate? You don't look at "suicides", you look at self inflicted deaths. You look at self inflicted deaths from people jumping from high places, and you look at the total number of self inflicted death in the area. So far we strongly think that fencing off places like multi-story car-parks saves life and reduces total numbers of self-inflicted deaths.
anon1m0us 7y ago
How much of this is typical social indoctrination? Teach children early that they are constantly spied on and they'll accept it in their cars, on their phones, in their houses. Total surveillance state. I'm more and more certain much of this is the result of post-modernism. God is dead. We can no longer expect the fear of hell or desire for heaven to keep us in line, so the state must become the omniscient god watching over us.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Intentional or not, that's precisely what will happen.
- losteric 7y ago
  > I'm more and more certain much of this is the result of post-modernism. God is dead. We can no longer expect the fear of hell or desire for heaven to keep us in line, so the state must become the omniscient god watching over us. I wish more people would see our police state through that lens, because hell and heaven never kept people in line and the state will do no better. It's all just metric-driven management... in the long-run, nothing really keeps the masses in line.
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    incentive structures and monitoring don't influence people's behavior?
    - floren 7y ago
      People still murdered and committed adultery and broke the Sabbath even after they'd been told that an omniscient being would definitely know and punish them. I think that was the poster's point, anyway.
      - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
        (not personally religious, or really for surveillance in schools, would probably teach my children to build their skills circumventing it to be honest) But surely that's a strawman. No one thinks religion would stop all evil or all people, but there certainly seems to be some kind of psychological effect from being brought up in such a framework, which can be observed, for instance, in latent guilt and residual fear of hell and judgement that happens when people leave certain christian sects for instance, which is totally absent and baffling to those not from such a cultural background. I think its eminently feasible that SOME people are being 'held in line' through explicit or implicit fear of rules/authority/sanctity/hell/punishment/purity/etc provided by religious and social structures.
jkroe9jdje 7y ago
I wish people would stop asking why about this stuff. It’s biology. Emotional messaging is implanted in our brains early on. Swears are bad was still the norm when today’s public school admins were kids. Most people quit learning and reorganizing their worldview after college simply because that’s what most people do. The majority will never be as on top of integrating new information as data nerd types. We do this all the time in tech by saying don’t rewrite software it was good enough for us then. It’s the same emotional pattern in different contexts. It’s who we are: decision makers with the emotional tools and facts we can access in the moment. If you want the discussion around school administration to change, take your opinion out of this filter bubble full of like minded “rethinkers” and go to a damn school board meeting and lobby your state board of education. Knowing this thread they’ll throw all their ideas about DRY out the window though and build an AI to replace school admins rather than use grandpas invention called “government.”
deleted 7y ago
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dsfyu404ed 7y ago
On the bright side (well, less dark side really) at least it teaches the kids a very important lesson about putting things in writing while they are young and stakes are low.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  "Give me six lines written by the most polite kid, and our contractor's child safety system will find enough in them to expel him."
astrobe_ 7y ago
1984 is boring. Point them to Demolition Man and Minority Report instead.
cosmie 7y ago
> All your doing is preventing communication using school provided technology and eroding students trust in the school. You're not actually preventing a shooting. Kids can still do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do to stop it. From the school's perspective, that's likely still considered a success. Lawyers are creative, and school systems (as an extension of the government) are rich targets. If someone is naive enough to use the school communication system for those things and the monitoring software gets triggered and intervention occurred, then the school has documented proof that they did what they could. If something uses the school system and the monitoring software missed signs of it, then it's the software's fault and not theirs. If someone is shrewd enough to not use the school's system for that because they know it's being monitored, well then you can't blame the school for not seeing messages it had no access to. Only one of those three scenarios does much to prevent things from happening, and is the least likely one. But all three of the scenarios limit the potential to somehow get a multi-million dollar negligence judgement out of the school if something bad actually happens.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  We need an America-specific corollary to Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by an attempt to avoid liability in a maximally litigious society." So many of these disturbing developments, that people are quick to attribute to an intentional campaign to desensitize people to government surveillance, are really caused by people trying to CYA. That doesn't make them OK, not by a long shot, but if you misunderstand their causes you're not going to get anywhere in pushing back against them.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    I agree 100% this is about CYA and not a true interest in preventing bad things. However it is a bad thing in itself, in addition to profanity they police illicit sex contact such as normal underage high school sex, attempts, or discussion. What a nightmare to have that sort of thing be monitored by some private quasi-police security agency (even worse a private company masquerading as a police agency that doesn't have to follow the bill of rights). I want to throw out though that every fascist and totalitarian movement in the 20th century also had nothing but the best of intentions and was guided by truly moral people who genuinely had the best interests of the people in mind. So saying someone is a good person with well-intentions doesn't mean nothing, it's actually a huge red flag. Also this is obviously a third party interception of private communications between two parties without consent. It's wiretapping. Wiretapping laws need to be extended to cover textual representations of conversational discourse.
flippinburgers 7y ago
It is pretty well established that people are allowed to speak their mind in our society, but they better be ready for the consequences!
TomMckenny 7y ago
The worst of it is that kids learn being monitored is normal and "a good thing". Something far too many adults are already comfortable with.
lettergram 7y ago
I kind of can't help myself since I'm in a similar space... https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=user%3Achoward https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=... I even wrote back in 2015 about analyzing your email (school in my case): https://austingwalters.com/analyzing-email-data/ https://austingwalters.com/analyzing-email-data/ The truth is companies will do anything to mitigate risk. Knowing or even thinking you can know what someone can do can mitigate that risk. This has a potential savings that can literally be greater than your companies entire net worth. So, systems like this will continue to get more pervasive.
maxheadroom 7y ago
>On top of that they monitor for profanity. WHY? It doesn't harm anyone and lets people express themselves how they want. The war against profanity is strictly a Puritan, I mean American, thing. In most sensible countries in Europe (read: those still not devoutly religious), profanity on the "state-run" TV stations is a normative part of life (e.g.: "helvete" or "fan" in Swedish - https://youtu.be/4ofbqaLiPe4 https://youtu.be/4ofbqaLiPe4).
iriwqbz 7y ago
The monitoring of children is such an insidious topic because it is so easy for the average reasonable person to justify. I know my own Mother has felt parental guilt that she location-track me and my young sister, because, what if something happens? Children generally get less independence and rights than adults and we do this because it is always adults that have to be responsible for their wellbeing. So it is very easy to justify this kind of montoring, and at least here, there are likely legal obligations for schools to do so. My school in Australia did it completely transparently through a company named "CyberHound" of all things. It advertises in a similar way "protect the children from mental health issues" by running an MITM[1] on all SSL traffic over your school network to inspect all all the push notifications, webpages et cetera sent to your students' devices. The difference is this was transparent and consenting[2]. The thing is I would not expect any institution's internal network to be un-logged, be that the company I work for, or a school or government. Passive logging of internet sessions and metadata is totally acceptable, its this kind of analysis and information sharing that can be really harmful. Although I suppose I only say that because my shool actually had mental health support that was very visibly available, and the tracking was quite easily circumvented. 1: Root certificate we have to install on devices 2: All school machines have an "I agree to acceptable use" prompt on login and we have to install certificates ourselves.
raxxorrax 7y ago
In the current climate, if you can create a product a school can refer to to prove they are doing everything for the safety of your kids, you can probably decide the price yourself. But I agree that this is probably one of the worst ways a school could help reduce these kind of problems.

whydoyoucare 7y ago

Well said. As the article states, it is indeed a solution in wait of a problem. Also don't discount the possibility that the school may have a need to be seen doing something (meaningful or not). 1984 it is indeed.

RealStickman 7y ago

If I were a student and knew about that I'd purposefully put in a variety of words and phrases that might get flagged in every email

lopmotr 7y ago
Then you'd be doing a "violation" and get a warning. Presumably some in-school punishment for repeat violations.
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  There's plenty of space for triggering false positives. "I wonder if I'm gay.", "I read that if you drink bleach it could kill you", or just meta "what happens if I put the phrase XYZ here?".
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Sounds like a good opportunity for a civics lesson. Today's subject: mass civil disobedience.
  - kps 7y ago
    Given the article's description of the company's hiring process, it seems like it would be straightforward for a group of high school students to become ‘Safety Representatives’ and… act creatively.
- lilott8 7y ago
  In this context, I'd be encouraging my children to do this (and certainly take the blame for them); false positives ftw! It'd be a great, teachable moment where I can discuss many sociological, technological, and ethical issues at once. On top of that I can teach them a thing or two about opsec. The school is really at a loss here for retribution: in many instance the students are required to use the school's equipment for completing assignments and projects. So the worst they can really do is "restrict" usage -- but that isn't really any different than what they already do. So it's a bit of a headache for me and the kid(s)? A small price to pay for demonstrating the hilarious shortcomings of implementing a technological solution to a purely human problem -- one that requires specially trained humans to fix. (Of course I'd make sure the kid(s) give me their blessing before messing with the school) On another note: I have extensive experience working for school districts. This is absolutely a CYA attempt with no foresight into what the outcome of this terrible experiment will be. These solutions tend to be hacked together, easy to circumvent, and poorly implemented. While I have no direct experience with the product mentioned, I do have experience with school-focused solutions. We had to pay the extra money for purely commercial solutions to get anything that was worth the money.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    This is not a false positive, attempts to subvert or sabotage surveillance clearly indicate latent antisocial tendencies and should be punished to the full extent of the law. Please report yourself to the nearest Malcontent Utilization Facility, citizen!
    - swasheck 7y ago
      i got it. not sure why you're being downvoted.
      - Uehreka 7y ago
        Hacker News doesn’t like jokes. Or rather, if you’re going to make a joke, it had better be as part of a substantive comment that exists to do more than just tell a joke.
diabeetusman 7y ago
Time to do a report on Scunthorpe
- ironic_ali 7y ago
  Funny story.. back in 2000 a new boss starts at UK govt agency with student focus. This is around University entrance time. He wants to stamp some authority and show he knows better than the last boss. To add some context he was a Londoner in Scotland who obviously knew better than the great unwashed north of the border. Pretty much the first thing he does is look at the flagged words list on incoming emails. Why he felt this level of micromanaging would endear him to his Scottish team is lost to time. Anyway, he snorted and with a smirk berated the admin team for leaving out "cunt" and told them to add it in. The admin team, said nothing and did what they were told and waited.... Over the weekend over 10000 emails were flagged and had to be manually read by the small admin team, who were used to a small amount every week. Our London friend handed his notice in within 6 months :)
  - harimau777 7y ago
    Does the word have a different meaning in Scotland or is it just not considered offensive?
    - ljm 7y ago
      In Scotland, the north of England, and Australia, you'll often hear 'cunt' used as a term of endearment between good friends. It's a banter thing.
JohnFen 7y ago
And if I were your parent, I'd seriously look into moving you to a less abusive school.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  In small towns there's often no choice. There's only one high school in Santa Fe.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes, this is true. Sometimes doing right for your kids requires a great deal of sacrifice. When my eldest was in primary school in a very small town, they implemented a surveillance system that I (and a lot of other parents) objected greatly to. There was no other school in the area, and home-schooling was not an option for us. It took a year or so, but we resolved the situation by moving to another city.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

Welcome to the modern mentality of alleged criminals being guilty until proven innocent. We have our Bill of Rights for a reason here in America but some lessons are easily forgotten.

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
> We have our Bill of Rights for a reason here in America What's been implicitly added is "For adults only". Whatever the under-18 class of "children" (except when they aren't!) don't have rights.
- kelnos 7y ago
  Exactly. And if you bring up a generation of kids who have been normalized to the idea of constant surveillance and censorship, they're less likely to assert their rights as adults. Many of them will even learn the lesson that surveillance and censorship are good things that save lives. It's insidious and disgusting.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  In many (most? all?) states children are effectively still property. For example, in many states it's legal for parents to steal wages from their children even if their children are high school graduates with a work permit - all based on age. Happened to someone I know. She had a well-paying job but her parents basically stole all the income, naturally making it harder to move out with no savings.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    That's really disturbing that someone's parents would steal their children's money if it's legally acquired.

Terretta 7y ago

I’ve observed “if I were a parent” may be a nonsense phrase. I’m not aware of any parents who still hold the same beliefs across the board as their preconceptions of how they’d think about their kids.

choward 7y ago
I knew someone would say this. I almost used "as a parent" instead. Hacker news and the internet in general is full of people making opinions about things they aren't experts in and that's okay. I wonder why parenting is the one that always triggers this kind of response. "You have to be a parent to have an opinion about parenting." What if I had said "if I worked for Gaggle" or "if I was a teacher". Would you have the same response?
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  I think it's a combination of being tired of constantly feeling judged on a very personal part of your life and a feeling that the dependency and inconvince a child, especially a small child, adds to your life is unmatched by almost anything else, giving other little experience to draw from when criticizing or otherwise "trying to help". Even when coming from other parents, unsolicited "advice" can be annoying because every child is different and every parent likes to parent differently.
- Terretta 7y ago
  I have observed the above re: parent vs. not yet parent. Haven’t observed such a universal perspective shift across other fields of ‘expertise’, nor do those perspectives seem to shift until after more experience, while with parenting it seems to often shift on first realization (“at first sight”). So no, “if I were a teacher” or “if I worked in medicine” and the like don’t seem as likely to be subject to change. // Just to be clear: not saying this as a parent. I am not a parent.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  There needs to be a name for the reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I.e., "You don't have the right piece of paper/you're from the wrong background/insert other personal attack here, therefore you're not qualified to comment." It's an annoying, cheap way to dismiss a perfectly good argument via ad-hominem means rather than actual reasoning.

eagsalazar2 7y ago

Look, I agree 100% this tech is creepy, invasive, and bad but your argument that it doesn't prevent bad behavior (the extreme of which is school shootings) doesn't seem true at face value (honestly I have no idea but neither do you). Yes of course very determined and very smart kids might still get away with it but there is a very good chance it actually does decrease the rate of these incidents significantly. The argument you are making is basically identical to the old "guns don't kill people" argument which actually has been proven completely false. Similarly, minimal suicide prevention measures (like fences on bridges, or again lack of access to guns) while they can usually be circumvented by the extremely determined do usually prevent suicides.

vageli 7y ago
> The argument you are making is basically identical to the old "guns don't kill people" argument which actually has been proven completely false. Similarly, minimal suicide prevention measures (like fences on bridges, or again lack of access to guns) while they can usually be circumvented by the extremely determined do usually prevent suicides. How do you measure the efficacy of a fence on a bridge? By the number of suicides by jumping off a bridge or by looking at the suicide numbers in aggregate? Of course it would reduce suicide by jumping but is it actually reducing suicide generally or only a specific method?
- DanBC 7y ago
  We have a couple of natural experiments. England changed from coal gas to natural gas. That prevented one very common method, and it led to a drop in total suicide rates. It took a while for method substitution to happen. We also saw similar drops when catalytic convertors were added to cars in the UK. One of the important parts of reducing access to means an methods is to cause people to switch to less lethal methods. Removing access to coproxamol (in the UK) saved lives because people switched to other meds. Any overdose is dangerous, but some overdoses are less likely to be lethal if medical attention is sought quickly. England changed the quantities of paracetamol that people could buy. This link only talks about self-poisoning (so it doesn't address the method substitution) but it does talk about characteristics of some people who chose this method: did they go to buy the meds or did they use what was in the home? Were they able to buy large quantities or did the legislation work? What was the length of time between having the initial thought of wanting to overdose and then carrying out the act? http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resparacet.html http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resparacet.html At the moment one of the strongest recommendations we can make for suicide prevention is to reduce access to means and methods, because that has clear evidence to support it. You can hear Professor Nav Kapur talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0&t=415s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0&t=415s The NCISH will probably have more information or links to research about method substitution: https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/ https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/ It's important that removing access to means and methods is not the only thing we do! It's important, but it's only a part of a package of suicide prevention measures. > How do you measure the efficacy of a fence on a bridge? By the number of suicides by jumping off a bridge or by looking at the suicide numbers in aggregate? You don't look at "suicides", you look at self inflicted deaths. You look at self inflicted deaths from people jumping from high places, and you look at the total number of self inflicted death in the area. So far we strongly think that fencing off places like multi-story car-parks saves life and reduces total numbers of self-inflicted deaths.

anon1m0us 7y ago

How much of this is typical social indoctrination? Teach children early that they are constantly spied on and they'll accept it in their cars, on their phones, in their houses. Total surveillance state. I'm more and more certain much of this is the result of post-modernism. God is dead. We can no longer expect the fear of hell or desire for heaven to keep us in line, so the state must become the omniscient god watching over us.

JohnFen 7y ago
Intentional or not, that's precisely what will happen.
losteric 7y ago
> I'm more and more certain much of this is the result of post-modernism. God is dead. We can no longer expect the fear of hell or desire for heaven to keep us in line, so the state must become the omniscient god watching over us. I wish more people would see our police state through that lens, because hell and heaven never kept people in line and the state will do no better. It's all just metric-driven management... in the long-run, nothing really keeps the masses in line.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  incentive structures and monitoring don't influence people's behavior?
  - floren 7y ago
    People still murdered and committed adultery and broke the Sabbath even after they'd been told that an omniscient being would definitely know and punish them. I think that was the poster's point, anyway.
    - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
      (not personally religious, or really for surveillance in schools, would probably teach my children to build their skills circumventing it to be honest) But surely that's a strawman. No one thinks religion would stop all evil or all people, but there certainly seems to be some kind of psychological effect from being brought up in such a framework, which can be observed, for instance, in latent guilt and residual fear of hell and judgement that happens when people leave certain christian sects for instance, which is totally absent and baffling to those not from such a cultural background. I think its eminently feasible that SOME people are being 'held in line' through explicit or implicit fear of rules/authority/sanctity/hell/punishment/purity/etc provided by religious and social structures.

jkroe9jdje 7y ago

I wish people would stop asking why about this stuff. It’s biology. Emotional messaging is implanted in our brains early on. Swears are bad was still the norm when today’s public school admins were kids. Most people quit learning and reorganizing their worldview after college simply because that’s what most people do. The majority will never be as on top of integrating new information as data nerd types. We do this all the time in tech by saying don’t rewrite software it was good enough for us then. It’s the same emotional pattern in different contexts. It’s who we are: decision makers with the emotional tools and facts we can access in the moment. If you want the discussion around school administration to change, take your opinion out of this filter bubble full of like minded “rethinkers” and go to a damn school board meeting and lobby your state board of education. Knowing this thread they’ll throw all their ideas about DRY out the window though and build an AI to replace school admins rather than use grandpas invention called “government.”

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

On the bright side (well, less dark side really) at least it teaches the kids a very important lesson about putting things in writing while they are young and stakes are low.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
"Give me six lines written by the most polite kid, and our contractor's child safety system will find enough in them to expel him."

astrobe_ 7y ago

1984 is boring. Point them to Demolition Man and Minority Report instead.

cosmie 7y ago

> All your doing is preventing communication using school provided technology and eroding students trust in the school. You're not actually preventing a shooting. Kids can still do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do to stop it. From the school's perspective, that's likely still considered a success. Lawyers are creative, and school systems (as an extension of the government) are rich targets. If someone is naive enough to use the school communication system for those things and the monitoring software gets triggered and intervention occurred, then the school has documented proof that they did what they could. If something uses the school system and the monitoring software missed signs of it, then it's the software's fault and not theirs. If someone is shrewd enough to not use the school's system for that because they know it's being monitored, well then you can't blame the school for not seeing messages it had no access to. Only one of those three scenarios does much to prevent things from happening, and is the least likely one. But all three of the scenarios limit the potential to somehow get a multi-million dollar negligence judgement out of the school if something bad actually happens.

Analemma_ 7y ago
We need an America-specific corollary to Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by an attempt to avoid liability in a maximally litigious society." So many of these disturbing developments, that people are quick to attribute to an intentional campaign to desensitize people to government surveillance, are really caused by people trying to CYA. That doesn't make them OK, not by a long shot, but if you misunderstand their causes you're not going to get anywhere in pushing back against them.
- droithomme 7y ago
  I agree 100% this is about CYA and not a true interest in preventing bad things. However it is a bad thing in itself, in addition to profanity they police illicit sex contact such as normal underage high school sex, attempts, or discussion. What a nightmare to have that sort of thing be monitored by some private quasi-police security agency (even worse a private company masquerading as a police agency that doesn't have to follow the bill of rights). I want to throw out though that every fascist and totalitarian movement in the 20th century also had nothing but the best of intentions and was guided by truly moral people who genuinely had the best interests of the people in mind. So saying someone is a good person with well-intentions doesn't mean nothing, it's actually a huge red flag. Also this is obviously a third party interception of private communications between two parties without consent. It's wiretapping. Wiretapping laws need to be extended to cover textual representations of conversational discourse.

flippinburgers 7y ago

It is pretty well established that people are allowed to speak their mind in our society, but they better be ready for the consequences!

TomMckenny 7y ago

The worst of it is that kids learn being monitored is normal and "a good thing". Something far too many adults are already comfortable with.

lettergram 7y ago

I kind of can't help myself since I'm in a similar space... https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=user%3Achoward https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=... I even wrote back in 2015 about analyzing your email (school in my case): https://austingwalters.com/analyzing-email-data/ https://austingwalters.com/analyzing-email-data/ The truth is companies will do anything to mitigate risk. Knowing or even thinking you can know what someone can do can mitigate that risk. This has a potential savings that can literally be greater than your companies entire net worth. So, systems like this will continue to get more pervasive.

maxheadroom 7y ago

>On top of that they monitor for profanity. WHY? It doesn't harm anyone and lets people express themselves how they want. The war against profanity is strictly a Puritan, I mean American, thing. In most sensible countries in Europe (read: those still not devoutly religious), profanity on the "state-run" TV stations is a normative part of life (e.g.: "helvete" or "fan" in Swedish - https://youtu.be/4ofbqaLiPe4 https://youtu.be/4ofbqaLiPe4).

iriwqbz 7y ago

The monitoring of children is such an insidious topic because it is so easy for the average reasonable person to justify. I know my own Mother has felt parental guilt that she location-track me and my young sister, because, what if something happens? Children generally get less independence and rights than adults and we do this because it is always adults that have to be responsible for their wellbeing. So it is very easy to justify this kind of montoring, and at least here, there are likely legal obligations for schools to do so. My school in Australia did it completely transparently through a company named "CyberHound" of all things. It advertises in a similar way "protect the children from mental health issues" by running an MITM[1] on all SSL traffic over your school network to inspect all all the push notifications, webpages et cetera sent to your students' devices. The difference is this was transparent and consenting[2]. The thing is I would not expect any institution's internal network to be un-logged, be that the company I work for, or a school or government. Passive logging of internet sessions and metadata is totally acceptable, its this kind of analysis and information sharing that can be really harmful. Although I suppose I only say that because my shool actually had mental health support that was very visibly available, and the tracking was quite easily circumvented. 1: Root certificate we have to install on devices 2: All school machines have an "I agree to acceptable use" prompt on login and we have to install certificates ourselves.

raxxorrax 7y ago

In the current climate, if you can create a product a school can refer to to prove they are doing everything for the safety of your kids, you can probably decide the price yourself. But I agree that this is probably one of the worst ways a school could help reduce these kind of problems.