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Spy tech that followed kids home for remote learning

329 points by arkadiyt 5y ago

aslfdfhsd498 5y ago
What scares me is that this is a generation of kids that have been broken and domesticated. For whom tyranny is normal and natural. What happens when they are grown up and put in charge?
- vaidhy 5y ago
  Is this hyperbole or a serious statement? Kids broken and domesticated? tyranny normal and natural? What tyranny? What domesticated kids? You are living in a weird world where everything would be a slippery slope, if you truly believe this. You might need some help here.
  - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
    I suspect that lockdowns look a lot like prison to an irrational, developing child who's subject to surveillance and not allowed to see their friends for a year. Even outside of lockdowns, helicopter parenting seemed like a big problem.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      Haven't schools been described as prisons for like decades?
      - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
        That's true also, won't deny that.
        vaidhy 5y ago
        Of course.. By that means, everything is a prison because there are restrictions. A joke about type of building is not the same as kids broken and domesticated or tyranny. At the least, these supporting comments make me think that HN groupthink has slipped so far into a fantasy world full of hyperbole that no meaningful conversation can be had. Either your kids are in a cult or you are in a cult. I can only feel sorry for you folks. FWIW, I have 2 kids and they have a very healthy life with school, sports and time to play with their friends.
      - brewdad 5y ago
        My kid's high school is located in a part of town that is largely warehouses and hotels for business travelers. We joke that it's all just another warehouse with a different inventory.
    - jbm 5y ago
      I don't think any parent I know actually prevented their kids from meeting their friends other than at the very very beginning of the pandemic (and before vaccinations). Internet hysterics aside, I think most parents appreciate their kids have mental health needs. (Unless you think schoolmates are friends, in which case I have news for you...)
    - vaidhy 5y ago
      Is this your assumption or you are doing this to your kids? My kids had remote schools, but they also went and met with their friends (albeit a smaller group than usual). Most of the parents took enough precaution and given the age group, we were all comfortable with kids being with each other. Helicopter parenting is not related to the top level comment at all.
  - drdeadringer 5y ago
    Wait until you here the phrase "nanny state" regarding the UK.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    Your comment is an excellent example of the "medicalization of dissent". In your mind, this person you're disagreeing with isn't simply mistaken. They "need help". This type of rhetoric is against HN guidelines. It's also exacerbating the issue and the feelings this individual might have about "tyranny".
- mhh__ 5y ago
  A generation of kids growing up in what, the earliest known days of antiquity? It's the same shit just from a different hole as far as I'm concerned. That being said, I am grateful that I escaped school before the administration properly got a hold of computers. I went to a good school, so I doubt it would be hugely Orwellian, but the point stands - kids need separation.
- failrate 5y ago
  My kid and I both hate the invigilation trends in education, but he is far from broken/domesticated. Instead, it is inducing him to rebel against it. He is actively looking for ways to defeat this garbage tech.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    Your son, and how many others? A precious minority, I'm sure. Probably a disappearing one, as well.
    - psychlops 5y ago
      Definitely anecdata. My kids are clueless to the wizardy I work, so are their friends.
      - failrate 5y ago
        Are they uninterested? Wouldn't you like to share with them?
        sodality2 5y ago
        In all likelihood it won't be received well. Almost no one cares about privacy, and if there's any resistance to using an alternate service it will not be used.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Drama much? I'm dead against surveillance, but that doesn't mean freedom inures in being maximally wild and uncontrollable. This is also not a new phenomenon, as far back as the Victorian era adults would complain that 'children should be seen and not heard.' Hyperbole is rarely conducive to productive discussion.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  There are multiple possible outcomes - one is that you will teach people to properly compartmentalize what they say in the family/among friends from what they say in public/in school. Actually, coming from Czech Republic, this was the norm when the communist party was still in power - it was clear that you had to say different things (or rather, not to say certain things) in public from what you could talk about with family and close trusted friends. Children have been taught this from young age, resulting in adults being to do this compartmentalization almost automatically. No wonder, it was a survival skill basically - you never know who could be an informant or just opportunist to use any anti-party things you say against you for personal gain. Its actually quite interesting to see people who don't come from this background and actually say what they really think in the public! ;-)
chuckee 5y ago
> In emails and chat messages, students discussed violent impulses, eating disorders, abuse at home, bouts of depression and, as one student put it, “ending my life.” Of course the email and chat apps had prominent "Your messages may be monitored, including by your teachers" notifications, right? Kids weren't misled into thinking their private conversations were private, right?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  The point is they have no choice. There is no 'I don't want to be monitored' button. Just a message that says 'you are our bitch and there is nothing you can do about it'. The same as every other TOS for services that have become essential in our society and economy.
  - gberger 5y ago
    Don't they have the choice of communicating some other device or method? They are not forced to use the school computer. Many of them have phones, or a family computer.
    - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
      Wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades we have AI monitoring your communication ready to flag you for psychiatric evaluation.
      - switch007 5y ago
        Already a thing
      - feikname 5y ago
        You may be interested in an anime called Psycho Pass that kinda has that as a plot point. Law enforcement can point a gun at you to evaluate your psychiatric level and kill you if deemed to high
    - giantg2 5y ago
ve55 5y ago
I firmly believe that one of our greatest current failures as a society is the extent with which we completely accept these types of dystopic conditions - every single action we take and word we type is surveilled, permanently stored with zero recourse, analyzed or blocked by untransparent third-party data leviathans that share few of our own interests, and often sold, shared, and completely neglected while data breaches happen en masse. Not only do we have virtually no ability to opt out of this, but these practices now begin the moment someone is born. When I was younger I spent a lot of my time advocating for privacy, informing people of how bad the state of surveillance was, how bad it would be in the future, and what we could do to improve things. Eventually this turned out to be very bad for my mental health, because I not only realized most people didn't give a shit, but also that no matter what I did, I had no power to improve things by what felt like a even single epsilon. With the advances we're making in hardware and machine learning, I think we are setting ourselves up for future disasters that we have barely begun to imagine - our entire society's communications and thoughts are owned by everyone except ourselves, and our ability to analyze, predict, and censor the populace with this extreme centralization of power and data is currently being scaled up even more by every tech/ad/communications corporation (and government) in the world. I still try to do what I can, but it feels like I'm able to do less and less with each passing year; I am constantly forced to use products and services that do terrible things with the data they collect on me, yet it is increasingly becoming something outside of my control. Perhaps this makes it obvious why normal people rarely try to use privacy-preserving software and practices: they recognize how difficult and hopeless the endeavor is, and they'd rather not dedicate their lives to such an impossible feat such as communicating privately with their friends and family. The only things I can really hope for here is that we get an actual data protection law or basic consumer bill of rights in countries like the US, but I don't see this happening any time soon. I also predict that the general populace will recognize the vast importance of this issue in the future (whether that is +5 or +30 years, I have no clue), but likely only after some very terrible events occur (it would seem the current state of advertisements, data breaches, mass surveillance, and censorship is nowhere near what it will take). This comment turned out to be more negative and hopeless than I had wanted, so I'll add that I also donated to the EFF - they seem to be pretty principled and helpful in this area, and they also sent me a cool T-shirt. I'm fortunate that I'm able to use software like Signal/IRC/Matrix with my close friends, but I wish that everyone else could be given the right of private self-expression and communiucation as well.
stupidcar 5y ago
It's funny how every society has its own way of mistreating children, yet never considers it a problem at the time. We look at the ways children were harmed and exploited throughout history and shake our heads at how our morally underdeveloped forebears could be so cruel and misguided. Then we turn around and declare that our children have no right whatsoever to privacy, and that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good". I firmly believe that a hundred years, people will look back on practices like this and shake their heads at the appalling attitudes their primitive ancestors had towards children. But I imagine that's little comfort to the kids subject to this kind of abuse.
- petermcneeley 5y ago
  This has nothing to do with the rights of children. This is about the school system as an ever present overbearing parent in place of the Childs real parents. Children do not have the right to privacy they are not adults.
  - cybernautique 5y ago
    I disagree, emphatically. Privacy _is_ a human right; nobody has the right, privilege, or ability to intrude and exfiltrate data from my mind. Computers are nothing less and nothing more than an amplification system for the mind. It ought to share the same privileged status as our deepest, innermost thoughts. Children have a right to privacy.
    - jbpnoy6fifty 5y ago
      My biggest concern regards the balance between privacy and monitoring is that children nowadays (and even adults) are highly enabled to commit social bullying. Nothing is really disciplining them properly, causing recurring “bowling for Columbine” events we see almost bi-monthly. It doesn’t help that foreign states are probably working to purposely inhibit or even disable American society as a community function. (See news about Russian state companies and Facebook manipulation from more recent news) Privacy is important, but public safety has a higher priority. The biggest risk is abuse of the data, not the basic mission of these monitoring services
tacker2000 5y ago
This is pretty outrageous. This constant need to fully control and monitor everything your kids are doing is getting out of hand and will by itself lead to severe problems and mental issues for the future generations. I mean, who didnt share or look at some porn when they were 10 years old? Would it be worth it for a whole army of teachers and consultants to descend on you and file an “incident report” and a “follow up” and “de brief” for this? What a colossal waste of resources and money. The $300k for the software could be better spent elsewhere. And yes, one suicide was apparently prevented, but then here we are again at the same argument, its like the one in the current apple/child porn case. Should we all get monitored just because of one positive but disproportionately small outcome?
- whiddershins 5y ago
  I did not share or look at porn at 10 years old, and I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet. I’m not sure there is gain in normalizing this.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    >I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet. Pre-puberty, probably not, no interest for obvious reasons. Pre-internet, absolutely. Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, etc were prevalent. BBS's existed too.
    - autoliteInline 5y ago
      Gotta ask how old are you? I do remember a Playboy when it came out in 1971. The Willy Rey issue (girl on the stock certificate). Nice looking. Not only were Playboys pretty rare, but they were a different kettle of fish than any modern adult images/video. Are times better or worse? I couldn't tell you. Lots of differences. Many women never have children. Divorce is common. People aren't raised on farms with all the attendant physical realities of life. Slavery was common in most societies. People got married at young ages. Sex has been secretive or not depending on the era. Probably the worst thing about porn is a scarring of the mind, sex as non-participatory act, exotica as normal, staring at screens, addictive behavior, the internet as a net negative.
lykahb 5y ago
I'd be interested to see a study for a link between the suicide rate and the degree of surveillance in one's life, separated from the influence of the social networks that already has been studied. It seems to be quite obvious that the lack of personal space would cause or exacerbate the mental issues. However, the modern society tends to ignore the problems that cannot be easily tracked or assigned a metric.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Survelliance certainly burns trust and without trust people get isolated.
swayvil 5y ago
It's "To Save The Kids" (to quote the article). Stepping on our rights, invading our privacy, forcing us to do various things that we would rather not do - to protect us - for our health - for the public welfare. They need to change their tune. This one is getting really really old. Like at least 80 years old. Maybe older.
mavsman 5y ago
Interesting that HN is up in arms about this but I’d imagine most still use Google which spies on our kids in order to sell them stuff and manipulate their behavior. Why do we just accept that porn is being peddled to 10 year olds? I don’t know if Gaggle is the right approach but they’re at least attempting to help our kids while most of Silicon Valley is just trying to monetize them.
- mavsman 5y ago
  Also, anyone see that episode of Black Mirror with the contact lenses kids would wear? Similarities
nobodyandproud 5y ago
My school district issues Chromebooks (mandatory). Buried in the school usage guide/hand-out is a paragraph that states that the school reserves the right to enable the microphone and camera at any time, with no warning or notice required by the school faculty. It’s ridiculous and I’m not sure I can do anything about it.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Is that not just for accessibility though? Surely the more affluent kids just use their own, more powerful computers for homework. I'm guessing the Chromebooks are just for the lower-class kids. I could be wrong though.
  - Nullabillity 5y ago
    Isn't that even worse? "Pay not to have your privacy invaded!"
  - brewdad 5y ago
    My son has a nice, recent model laptop. He borrowed a Chromebook from the school last year because he refused to install their test monitoring spyware on his personal machine.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Good for him!
- dylan604 5y ago
  Don't allow it in the house while not in use specifically for school. Keep it in a faraday cage at the least. All sorts of ways of combating this type of bullshit, and it's also a teachable moment for your kids. The problem is this is similar behavior to those wearing tinfoil hats. What used to be signs of crazy are now normal day things.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Has any spy tech ever left? I remember vaguely some public discussion about CCTV somewhere in the mid 90s and now I live safely in the knowledge that I can be tracked 24/7 whenever I enter the city.
- Jach 5y ago
  "Tracked" is a bit much, for good and bad. There are potential benefits to prolific tracking, but there has to be a system of integration to realize them, which is totally lacking. In Shenzhen, if someone steals your wallet, the police can collect camera data from all sorts of sources around the time and place and track the thief down, and you have a reasonable expectation of getting your property back. In random US city, even if there are likely many cameras that could provide similar tracking capabilities, police will just shrug. So we don't even get any of the theoretical benefits to all this surveillance, all we're left with is random abuse.
indymike 5y ago
Right before COVID hit, I called my local school system out for installing spyware on my son and daughter's chromebooks. These were not provided by the school, they were bought by me. The spyware included a keylogger, something that forwarded every URL requested, a screenshotter, and a popunder autoclicker (yes, ad fraud). After a few emails back and forth, I sent one in demanding to see a search warrant and to know what horrible behavior the school believed gave them the right to search my computer. About 10 minutes later the spyware was removed from my son's school Chrome account and I got a call from the school system CIO who was making extra-sure I wasn't going to take further legal action.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Nice. Most schools are getting are getting around this by providing chromebooks... but making them mandatory and parents responsible for any damage.
  - indymike 5y ago
    The lawyer thought it would not have mattered if the school provided the hardware or not. There was no reason to be looking for crime, without at least a warrant. Additionally, the Chromebook might be plugged into my home network, where it might be used to surviel more than my child's academic usage. The fact uniformed police officers were on the school's payroll was enough to turn it into a constitutional issue. It is really important that parents be willing to stand up for our children's rights. They don't know better, and they don't have the money. And yes, as a parent, it's worth spending money on.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      > uniformed police officers were on the school's payroll This is nuts. Even in countries that are quite authoritarian politically there's way less policing of boring daily life. You are living in a ridiculous police state.
      - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
giantg2 5y ago
I wonder how much harm the constant surveillance does. We are training kids that someone is always watching. That they have to censor their thoughts and hold in their feelings rather than talk about them with others for fear of it being determined to be 'wrong'. How many of these kids will be suspended, expelled, medicated, etc for things that were harmless? I think this surveillance will cause these kids to be less independent and delay their maturation because it's safer to do what you're told, not explore questions you have, and suppress your opinions. The number of conversations I had in school that would have gotten me I'm trouble today would be a lot. I would guess they would have expelled me for some of it, even though it was totally harmless. Where is the cost benefit analysis? Or is this just another 'common sense' solution because 'think of the children'?
- 123pie123 5y ago
  children need to experience the world, they need to make mistakes and learn from their mistakes -thats whats being young is all about take that away and they'll make mistakes as adults with more serious consequences
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    Some things that some people view as mistakes are not necessarily large mistakes. For example, people swear all the time, and yet some schools might expel or suspend the child if the child is caught swearing. Having such a reaction to something so minor is a problem.
    - II2II 5y ago
      > Having such a reaction to something so minor is a problem. Swearing is one of those things that ranges from not being a problem to being a big problem. Kids using words because they are forbidden is not a problem. A kid swearing in front of teachers to signal disrespect is something that needs to be addressed. A child swearing at another child in anger, then it may be necessary to unwind what's going on and that may determine if harsh consequences are necessary. While I have never heard of a child being suspended/expelled over swearing, yet if it did happen it was probably due to something else going on. Part of the problem with this surveillance is, at best, we can flag conversations that correlate with certain outcomes. Things like understanding context and motivation take discourse, yet understanding context and motivation are essential when considering a course of action. (Of course the other part of the problem are the privacy implications, which is horrific if even a tiny fraction of what the article claims is true.)
fmakunbound 5y ago
> “If it saved one kid, if it supported one caregiver, if it supported one family, I’ll take it,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.” The road to a totalitarian state is probably paved with this kind of save the kids shit.
- Clubber 5y ago
  It absolutely is. It's the justification given for the ramping up of the drug war in the 80s and the crime bill in the 90s that made the US the largest prison system in the world both relative to the population and absolute numbers. When you hear "think of the children," run. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2... https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history
atok1 5y ago
It is sick what people do to our children. This is an egregious example of why it should be very illegal to do any type of surveillance without clear consent from all parties. Even with the law, it is in my opinion that anyone being surveilled must be informed of this aggressive act.
gerbilly 5y ago
Why do we complain only when it's done to children? I'll never have an open mic installed in my house (alexa, google etc...) Yet it seems the generation of young engineers that built these things sees nothing wrong with them. Why? Maybe, because they had helicopter parents and were chaperoned and supervised 100% of the time during their childhoods. They have grown to see surveillance as inherently benign, because during their entire childhood they were surveiled by well meaning adults.
- teddyh 5y ago
  All watched over by machines of loving grace.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
This is probably one of the few bad thing about Covid that impacts me. Stuff like that makes me think really hard whether home schooling is a viable option for me to avoid a good chunk of this.
- duncan-donuts 5y ago
  This predates covid though. It just got worse because of covid. The tech has been there all along. And to be transparent I’m pretty much ready to homeschool my kids. My kids are actually in this district.
itronitron 5y ago
If the 2nd Amendment is preserved then the 4th Amendment should be as well.
thekevan 5y ago
One line near the beginning stands out to me though. "...that monitors students’ school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts." This is activity within an account that was intended for school use, or possibly, on a school issued computer. There should be an expectation of some level of lack of privacy within those areas. If they want privacy from the school, use an account or computer the school didn't give them. Yes, some people may not have the resources to get their own. But that doesn't mean the school has to let them do anything they want on the the resource that the did give them.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  I think this applies _to an extent._ Especially with how Google's been blurring the lines between a Google account being signed in and being signed in to Chrome, I think that's a somewhat unfair proposition. I signed into my work GSuite account on my personal laptop to do a quick P0 fix and Chrome decided to sign itself into my work account without asking- how helpful! If I were a student, this means Chrome would slurp my entire (PERSONAL!) browsing history into Google, and by extent- Gaggle. In fact, my former school district actually used Gaggle. I know this for two reasons- first, the IT manager said "oh and we get Gaggle alerts for things you do on your Google account" as a sidenote when giving the onboarding speech that no one listens to. Also, I got a warning a few times in my email for people saying dumb shit in large shared documents (yes, it flags _your_ account just for being in a docshare with people who write things that trigger the system). If there was a little notice on documents, emails, and chats that said "${service} monitors your usage on behalf of ${schoolDistrict}" or even just required you to agree to Gaggle's TOS I might have a different opinion, but it seems as though it was perhaps intentionally obscured. I know I said things like "ugh I have so much homework this weekend, kill me" to my friends in the hallways and in class, with the lockdown killing all those conversations and moving them online I can't imagine my parents getting an email every time I said something like that. tl;dr these are kids- don't normalize this, please. I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my employer used something like this to detect "security policy violations," etc. even though I keep my personal life off of my work laptop.
mLuby 5y ago
"It is a gift!" -Boromir Sounds like a great (after-school) opportunity to teach kids how to combat a surveillance state. An education they'll use when they're adults, imagine that!
BurnGpuBurn 5y ago
I can imagine the conversations this leads to: Mentor: "Hi! This is your mentor. We've noticed that you're suicidal, depressed, paranoid and generally not doing that well." Student: "How do you know that?" Mentor: "Oh, we've been monitoring everything you chat about with your friends and family. So we basically know all your secrets, if you've chatted about them in the past 1.5 years." Student: shoots herself.

329 points by arkadiyt 5y ago

What scares me is that this is a generation of kids that have been broken and domesticated. For whom tyranny is normal and natural. What happens when they are grown up and put in charge?

vaidhy 5y ago
Is this hyperbole or a serious statement? Kids broken and domesticated? tyranny normal and natural? What tyranny? What domesticated kids? You are living in a weird world where everything would be a slippery slope, if you truly believe this. You might need some help here.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  I suspect that lockdowns look a lot like prison to an irrational, developing child who's subject to surveillance and not allowed to see their friends for a year. Even outside of lockdowns, helicopter parenting seemed like a big problem.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Haven't schools been described as prisons for like decades?
    - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
      That's true also, won't deny that.
      - vaidhy 5y ago
        Of course.. By that means, everything is a prison because there are restrictions. A joke about type of building is not the same as kids broken and domesticated or tyranny. At the least, these supporting comments make me think that HN groupthink has slipped so far into a fantasy world full of hyperbole that no meaningful conversation can be had. Either your kids are in a cult or you are in a cult. I can only feel sorry for you folks. FWIW, I have 2 kids and they have a very healthy life with school, sports and time to play with their friends.
    - brewdad 5y ago
      My kid's high school is located in a part of town that is largely warehouses and hotels for business travelers. We joke that it's all just another warehouse with a different inventory.
  - jbm 5y ago
    I don't think any parent I know actually prevented their kids from meeting their friends other than at the very very beginning of the pandemic (and before vaccinations). Internet hysterics aside, I think most parents appreciate their kids have mental health needs. (Unless you think schoolmates are friends, in which case I have news for you...)
  - vaidhy 5y ago
    Is this your assumption or you are doing this to your kids? My kids had remote schools, but they also went and met with their friends (albeit a smaller group than usual). Most of the parents took enough precaution and given the age group, we were all comfortable with kids being with each other. Helicopter parenting is not related to the top level comment at all.
- drdeadringer 5y ago
  Wait until you here the phrase "nanny state" regarding the UK.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  Your comment is an excellent example of the "medicalization of dissent". In your mind, this person you're disagreeing with isn't simply mistaken. They "need help". This type of rhetoric is against HN guidelines. It's also exacerbating the issue and the feelings this individual might have about "tyranny".
mhh__ 5y ago
A generation of kids growing up in what, the earliest known days of antiquity? It's the same shit just from a different hole as far as I'm concerned. That being said, I am grateful that I escaped school before the administration properly got a hold of computers. I went to a good school, so I doubt it would be hugely Orwellian, but the point stands - kids need separation.
failrate 5y ago
My kid and I both hate the invigilation trends in education, but he is far from broken/domesticated. Instead, it is inducing him to rebel against it. He is actively looking for ways to defeat this garbage tech.
- sodality2 5y ago
  Your son, and how many others? A precious minority, I'm sure. Probably a disappearing one, as well.
  - psychlops 5y ago
    Definitely anecdata. My kids are clueless to the wizardy I work, so are their friends.
    - failrate 5y ago
      Are they uninterested? Wouldn't you like to share with them?
      - sodality2 5y ago
        In all likelihood it won't be received well. Almost no one cares about privacy, and if there's any resistance to using an alternate service it will not be used.
anigbrowl 5y ago
Drama much? I'm dead against surveillance, but that doesn't mean freedom inures in being maximally wild and uncontrollable. This is also not a new phenomenon, as far back as the Victorian era adults would complain that 'children should be seen and not heard.' Hyperbole is rarely conducive to productive discussion.
m4rtink 5y ago
There are multiple possible outcomes - one is that you will teach people to properly compartmentalize what they say in the family/among friends from what they say in public/in school. Actually, coming from Czech Republic, this was the norm when the communist party was still in power - it was clear that you had to say different things (or rather, not to say certain things) in public from what you could talk about with family and close trusted friends. Children have been taught this from young age, resulting in adults being to do this compartmentalization almost automatically. No wonder, it was a survival skill basically - you never know who could be an informant or just opportunist to use any anti-party things you say against you for personal gain. Its actually quite interesting to see people who don't come from this background and actually say what they really think in the public! ;-)

chuckee 5y ago

> In emails and chat messages, students discussed violent impulses, eating disorders, abuse at home, bouts of depression and, as one student put it, “ending my life.” Of course the email and chat apps had prominent "Your messages may be monitored, including by your teachers" notifications, right? Kids weren't misled into thinking their private conversations were private, right?

Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
The point is they have no choice. There is no 'I don't want to be monitored' button. Just a message that says 'you are our bitch and there is nothing you can do about it'. The same as every other TOS for services that have become essential in our society and economy.
- gberger 5y ago
  Don't they have the choice of communicating some other device or method? They are not forced to use the school computer. Many of them have phones, or a family computer.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    Wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades we have AI monitoring your communication ready to flag you for psychiatric evaluation.
    - switch007 5y ago
      Already a thing
    - feikname 5y ago
      You may be interested in an anime called Psycho Pass that kinda has that as a plot point. Law enforcement can point a gun at you to evaluate your psychiatric level and kill you if deemed to high
  - giantg2 5y ago

ve55 5y ago

I firmly believe that one of our greatest current failures as a society is the extent with which we completely accept these types of dystopic conditions - every single action we take and word we type is surveilled, permanently stored with zero recourse, analyzed or blocked by untransparent third-party data leviathans that share few of our own interests, and often sold, shared, and completely neglected while data breaches happen en masse. Not only do we have virtually no ability to opt out of this, but these practices now begin the moment someone is born. When I was younger I spent a lot of my time advocating for privacy, informing people of how bad the state of surveillance was, how bad it would be in the future, and what we could do to improve things. Eventually this turned out to be very bad for my mental health, because I not only realized most people didn't give a shit, but also that no matter what I did, I had no power to improve things by what felt like a even single epsilon. With the advances we're making in hardware and machine learning, I think we are setting ourselves up for future disasters that we have barely begun to imagine - our entire society's communications and thoughts are owned by everyone except ourselves, and our ability to analyze, predict, and censor the populace with this extreme centralization of power and data is currently being scaled up even more by every tech/ad/communications corporation (and government) in the world. I still try to do what I can, but it feels like I'm able to do less and less with each passing year; I am constantly forced to use products and services that do terrible things with the data they collect on me, yet it is increasingly becoming something outside of my control. Perhaps this makes it obvious why normal people rarely try to use privacy-preserving software and practices: they recognize how difficult and hopeless the endeavor is, and they'd rather not dedicate their lives to such an impossible feat such as communicating privately with their friends and family. The only things I can really hope for here is that we get an actual data protection law or basic consumer bill of rights in countries like the US, but I don't see this happening any time soon. I also predict that the general populace will recognize the vast importance of this issue in the future (whether that is +5 or +30 years, I have no clue), but likely only after some very terrible events occur (it would seem the current state of advertisements, data breaches, mass surveillance, and censorship is nowhere near what it will take). This comment turned out to be more negative and hopeless than I had wanted, so I'll add that I also donated to the EFF - they seem to be pretty principled and helpful in this area, and they also sent me a cool T-shirt. I'm fortunate that I'm able to use software like Signal/IRC/Matrix with my close friends, but I wish that everyone else could be given the right of private self-expression and communiucation as well.

stupidcar 5y ago

It's funny how every society has its own way of mistreating children, yet never considers it a problem at the time. We look at the ways children were harmed and exploited throughout history and shake our heads at how our morally underdeveloped forebears could be so cruel and misguided. Then we turn around and declare that our children have no right whatsoever to privacy, and that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good". I firmly believe that a hundred years, people will look back on practices like this and shake their heads at the appalling attitudes their primitive ancestors had towards children. But I imagine that's little comfort to the kids subject to this kind of abuse.

petermcneeley 5y ago
This has nothing to do with the rights of children. This is about the school system as an ever present overbearing parent in place of the Childs real parents. Children do not have the right to privacy they are not adults.
- cybernautique 5y ago
  I disagree, emphatically. Privacy _is_ a human right; nobody has the right, privilege, or ability to intrude and exfiltrate data from my mind. Computers are nothing less and nothing more than an amplification system for the mind. It ought to share the same privileged status as our deepest, innermost thoughts. Children have a right to privacy.
  - jbpnoy6fifty 5y ago
    My biggest concern regards the balance between privacy and monitoring is that children nowadays (and even adults) are highly enabled to commit social bullying. Nothing is really disciplining them properly, causing recurring “bowling for Columbine” events we see almost bi-monthly. It doesn’t help that foreign states are probably working to purposely inhibit or even disable American society as a community function. (See news about Russian state companies and Facebook manipulation from more recent news) Privacy is important, but public safety has a higher priority. The biggest risk is abuse of the data, not the basic mission of these monitoring services

tacker2000 5y ago

This is pretty outrageous. This constant need to fully control and monitor everything your kids are doing is getting out of hand and will by itself lead to severe problems and mental issues for the future generations. I mean, who didnt share or look at some porn when they were 10 years old? Would it be worth it for a whole army of teachers and consultants to descend on you and file an “incident report” and a “follow up” and “de brief” for this? What a colossal waste of resources and money. The $300k for the software could be better spent elsewhere. And yes, one suicide was apparently prevented, but then here we are again at the same argument, its like the one in the current apple/child porn case. Should we all get monitored just because of one positive but disproportionately small outcome?

whiddershins 5y ago
I did not share or look at porn at 10 years old, and I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet. I’m not sure there is gain in normalizing this.
- Clubber 5y ago
  >I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet. Pre-puberty, probably not, no interest for obvious reasons. Pre-internet, absolutely. Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, etc were prevalent. BBS's existed too.
  - autoliteInline 5y ago
    Gotta ask how old are you? I do remember a Playboy when it came out in 1971. The Willy Rey issue (girl on the stock certificate). Nice looking. Not only were Playboys pretty rare, but they were a different kettle of fish than any modern adult images/video. Are times better or worse? I couldn't tell you. Lots of differences. Many women never have children. Divorce is common. People aren't raised on farms with all the attendant physical realities of life. Slavery was common in most societies. People got married at young ages. Sex has been secretive or not depending on the era. Probably the worst thing about porn is a scarring of the mind, sex as non-participatory act, exotica as normal, staring at screens, addictive behavior, the internet as a net negative.

lykahb 5y ago

I'd be interested to see a study for a link between the suicide rate and the degree of surveillance in one's life, separated from the influence of the social networks that already has been studied. It seems to be quite obvious that the lack of personal space would cause or exacerbate the mental issues. However, the modern society tends to ignore the problems that cannot be easily tracked or assigned a metric.

akomtu 5y ago
Survelliance certainly burns trust and without trust people get isolated.

swayvil 5y ago

It's "To Save The Kids" (to quote the article). Stepping on our rights, invading our privacy, forcing us to do various things that we would rather not do - to protect us - for our health - for the public welfare. They need to change their tune. This one is getting really really old. Like at least 80 years old. Maybe older.

mavsman 5y ago

Interesting that HN is up in arms about this but I’d imagine most still use Google which spies on our kids in order to sell them stuff and manipulate their behavior. Why do we just accept that porn is being peddled to 10 year olds? I don’t know if Gaggle is the right approach but they’re at least attempting to help our kids while most of Silicon Valley is just trying to monetize them.

mavsman 5y ago
Also, anyone see that episode of Black Mirror with the contact lenses kids would wear? Similarities

nobodyandproud 5y ago

My school district issues Chromebooks (mandatory). Buried in the school usage guide/hand-out is a paragraph that states that the school reserves the right to enable the microphone and camera at any time, with no warning or notice required by the school faculty. It’s ridiculous and I’m not sure I can do anything about it.

jimbob45 5y ago
Is that not just for accessibility though? Surely the more affluent kids just use their own, more powerful computers for homework. I'm guessing the Chromebooks are just for the lower-class kids. I could be wrong though.
- Nullabillity 5y ago
  Isn't that even worse? "Pay not to have your privacy invaded!"
- brewdad 5y ago
  My son has a nice, recent model laptop. He borrowed a Chromebook from the school last year because he refused to install their test monitoring spyware on his personal machine.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Good for him!
dylan604 5y ago
Don't allow it in the house while not in use specifically for school. Keep it in a faraday cage at the least. All sorts of ways of combating this type of bullshit, and it's also a teachable moment for your kids. The problem is this is similar behavior to those wearing tinfoil hats. What used to be signs of crazy are now normal day things.
- josephcsible 5y ago

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Has any spy tech ever left? I remember vaguely some public discussion about CCTV somewhere in the mid 90s and now I live safely in the knowledge that I can be tracked 24/7 whenever I enter the city.

Jach 5y ago
"Tracked" is a bit much, for good and bad. There are potential benefits to prolific tracking, but there has to be a system of integration to realize them, which is totally lacking. In Shenzhen, if someone steals your wallet, the police can collect camera data from all sorts of sources around the time and place and track the thief down, and you have a reasonable expectation of getting your property back. In random US city, even if there are likely many cameras that could provide similar tracking capabilities, police will just shrug. So we don't even get any of the theoretical benefits to all this surveillance, all we're left with is random abuse.

indymike 5y ago

Right before COVID hit, I called my local school system out for installing spyware on my son and daughter's chromebooks. These were not provided by the school, they were bought by me. The spyware included a keylogger, something that forwarded every URL requested, a screenshotter, and a popunder autoclicker (yes, ad fraud). After a few emails back and forth, I sent one in demanding to see a search warrant and to know what horrible behavior the school believed gave them the right to search my computer. About 10 minutes later the spyware was removed from my son's school Chrome account and I got a call from the school system CIO who was making extra-sure I wasn't going to take further legal action.

giantg2 5y ago
Nice. Most schools are getting are getting around this by providing chromebooks... but making them mandatory and parents responsible for any damage.
- indymike 5y ago
  The lawyer thought it would not have mattered if the school provided the hardware or not. There was no reason to be looking for crime, without at least a warrant. Additionally, the Chromebook might be plugged into my home network, where it might be used to surviel more than my child's academic usage. The fact uniformed police officers were on the school's payroll was enough to turn it into a constitutional issue. It is really important that parents be willing to stand up for our children's rights. They don't know better, and they don't have the money. And yes, as a parent, it's worth spending money on.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    > uniformed police officers were on the school's payroll This is nuts. Even in countries that are quite authoritarian politically there's way less policing of boring daily life. You are living in a ridiculous police state.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

giantg2 5y ago

I wonder how much harm the constant surveillance does. We are training kids that someone is always watching. That they have to censor their thoughts and hold in their feelings rather than talk about them with others for fear of it being determined to be 'wrong'. How many of these kids will be suspended, expelled, medicated, etc for things that were harmless? I think this surveillance will cause these kids to be less independent and delay their maturation because it's safer to do what you're told, not explore questions you have, and suppress your opinions. The number of conversations I had in school that would have gotten me I'm trouble today would be a lot. I would guess they would have expelled me for some of it, even though it was totally harmless. Where is the cost benefit analysis? Or is this just another 'common sense' solution because 'think of the children'?

123pie123 5y ago
children need to experience the world, they need to make mistakes and learn from their mistakes -thats whats being young is all about take that away and they'll make mistakes as adults with more serious consequences
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  Some things that some people view as mistakes are not necessarily large mistakes. For example, people swear all the time, and yet some schools might expel or suspend the child if the child is caught swearing. Having such a reaction to something so minor is a problem.
  - II2II 5y ago
    > Having such a reaction to something so minor is a problem. Swearing is one of those things that ranges from not being a problem to being a big problem. Kids using words because they are forbidden is not a problem. A kid swearing in front of teachers to signal disrespect is something that needs to be addressed. A child swearing at another child in anger, then it may be necessary to unwind what's going on and that may determine if harsh consequences are necessary. While I have never heard of a child being suspended/expelled over swearing, yet if it did happen it was probably due to something else going on. Part of the problem with this surveillance is, at best, we can flag conversations that correlate with certain outcomes. Things like understanding context and motivation take discourse, yet understanding context and motivation are essential when considering a course of action. (Of course the other part of the problem are the privacy implications, which is horrific if even a tiny fraction of what the article claims is true.)

fmakunbound 5y ago

> “If it saved one kid, if it supported one caregiver, if it supported one family, I’ll take it,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.” The road to a totalitarian state is probably paved with this kind of save the kids shit.

Clubber 5y ago
It absolutely is. It's the justification given for the ramping up of the drug war in the 80s and the crime bill in the 90s that made the US the largest prison system in the world both relative to the population and absolute numbers. When you hear "think of the children," run. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2... https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history

atok1 5y ago

It is sick what people do to our children. This is an egregious example of why it should be very illegal to do any type of surveillance without clear consent from all parties. Even with the law, it is in my opinion that anyone being surveilled must be informed of this aggressive act.

gerbilly 5y ago

Why do we complain only when it's done to children? I'll never have an open mic installed in my house (alexa, google etc...) Yet it seems the generation of young engineers that built these things sees nothing wrong with them. Why? Maybe, because they had helicopter parents and were chaperoned and supervised 100% of the time during their childhoods. They have grown to see surveillance as inherently benign, because during their entire childhood they were surveiled by well meaning adults.

teddyh 5y ago
All watched over by machines of loving grace.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

This is probably one of the few bad thing about Covid that impacts me. Stuff like that makes me think really hard whether home schooling is a viable option for me to avoid a good chunk of this.

duncan-donuts 5y ago
This predates covid though. It just got worse because of covid. The tech has been there all along. And to be transparent I’m pretty much ready to homeschool my kids. My kids are actually in this district.

itronitron 5y ago

If the 2nd Amendment is preserved then the 4th Amendment should be as well.

thekevan 5y ago

One line near the beginning stands out to me though. "...that monitors students’ school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts." This is activity within an account that was intended for school use, or possibly, on a school issued computer. There should be an expectation of some level of lack of privacy within those areas. If they want privacy from the school, use an account or computer the school didn't give them. Yes, some people may not have the resources to get their own. But that doesn't mean the school has to let them do anything they want on the the resource that the did give them.

jackson1442 5y ago
I think this applies _to an extent._ Especially with how Google's been blurring the lines between a Google account being signed in and being signed in to Chrome, I think that's a somewhat unfair proposition. I signed into my work GSuite account on my personal laptop to do a quick P0 fix and Chrome decided to sign itself into my work account without asking- how helpful! If I were a student, this means Chrome would slurp my entire (PERSONAL!) browsing history into Google, and by extent- Gaggle. In fact, my former school district actually used Gaggle. I know this for two reasons- first, the IT manager said "oh and we get Gaggle alerts for things you do on your Google account" as a sidenote when giving the onboarding speech that no one listens to. Also, I got a warning a few times in my email for people saying dumb shit in large shared documents (yes, it flags _your_ account just for being in a docshare with people who write things that trigger the system). If there was a little notice on documents, emails, and chats that said "${service} monitors your usage on behalf of ${schoolDistrict}" or even just required you to agree to Gaggle's TOS I might have a different opinion, but it seems as though it was perhaps intentionally obscured. I know I said things like "ugh I have so much homework this weekend, kill me" to my friends in the hallways and in class, with the lockdown killing all those conversations and moving them online I can't imagine my parents getting an email every time I said something like that. tl;dr these are kids- don't normalize this, please. I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my employer used something like this to detect "security policy violations," etc. even though I keep my personal life off of my work laptop.

mLuby 5y ago

"It is a gift!" -Boromir Sounds like a great (after-school) opportunity to teach kids how to combat a surveillance state. An education they'll use when they're adults, imagine that!

BurnGpuBurn 5y ago

I can imagine the conversations this leads to: Mentor: "Hi! This is your mentor. We've noticed that you're suicidal, depressed, paranoid and generally not doing that well." Student: "How do you know that?" Mentor: "Oh, we've been monitoring everything you chat about with your friends and family. So we basically know all your secrets, if you've chatted about them in the past 1.5 years." Student: shoots herself.