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Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance
- mmastrac 4y agoEDIT: content seems to be updated to point at https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sensorship https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sens... which is readable.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoyou just read the text in the boxes
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ColinWright 4y agoClick on a node to go to the original. (Snarky comment removed)
- sh4rks 4y agoThere was no need for that second comment
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mkmk3 4y agoClick on a box, the mastadon view is reasonable
- emeraldd 4y agoThe text scaling/font selection seems to be bad.
- jrootabega 4y agoThe official non-microblog source appears to be: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sensorship https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sens... The official microblog source appears to be: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109128406324931625 https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109128406324931625 The interesting graphical view in this submission looks like it is more intended for content like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26459603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26459603
- mmastrac 4y agoAh, thank you.
- mvh 4y agoI’m the student who wrote the twitter thread. Let me know if you have any questions!
- ColinWright 4y agoHere's a chart of the discussion on Twitter: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1578145220369084416.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1578145220369084416.svg Useful to see if you've missed any comments that you'd like to reply to.
- mvh 4y agoThanks!
- matheusmoreira 4y agoI just want to thank you. We need more people like you in the world. This sort of obscene surveillance should be illegal.
- mvh 4y agoThank you! Keep in mind this was a joint effort by many, many students. I just happened to tweet about it first.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoThanks to your colleagues as well. It couldn't have been easy to stand up to them.
- itronitron 4y agoProps to you and your fellow students for being the professionals in the room (along with a few of the professors.)
- mvh 4y agoThank you! Our faculty allies were very helpful as well, although in a more private way.
- sys_64738 4y agoWhat is the point of surveillance of grad students? I guess I don't get the value regardless of the intent.
- _trackno5 4y agoFrom what I understood, the point was to monitor how often grad students use their desks so they could move to time-sharing and the university could reduce costs. Guess it's a more dystopian version of open offices :P
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- qchris 4y ago> "They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students"
- chrisseaton 4y agoThis is in my opinion why you're better off as a graduate student, than a graduate worker, as some people want to become. When I was a graduate student I wasn't employed by the university, so they had no say in what I did with my time. You don’t need worker protections if you avoid being a worker in the first place!
- timy2shoes 4y agoUsually the worker portion comes from either TAing or RAing. In these cases you would most definitely be a worker.
- selimthegrim 4y agoYou don’t have FICA deducted.
- mjhay 4y agoYes you do (by default), same as any other worker. At least that's what it said on my tax forms and pay stubs.
- selimthegrim 4y agoOk then not social security
- mjhay 4y agoWrong again. I was classed as ordinary employee and had SS deductions just like any other job I've had.
- selimthegrim 4y agoOk well that was definitely not the case for my TA stipend.
- davewritescode 4y agoProud of the students at NEU who standup to this bullshit. This kind of thing always gives me hope for the next generation
- mkmk3 4y agoNo patience for this shit. Uninformed placement of sensors in your desk/workspace feels like a pretty disgusting move. I like the account, I hope itll inspire a harsher response where other workers have surveilance foisted on them
- jccalhoun 4y agoI'm glad these "listening sessions" actually resulted in anything positive. From my experience the "listening" at these meetings rarely results in action. I was in the final stretch of my phd when the administration decided to "reorganize" my department by splitting it up so they could take part of it and combine it with two other departments into a fancy "school" that they could use as a selling point. We had multiple "listening sessions" where we explained that maybe disbanding our interdisciplinary department wasn't a good idea. Guess what happened? They did exactly what they wanted and the professors I worked with are now spread to the four winds in different departments and some have left. But they got some multimillionaire to donate some money to put his name on the new school so they got what they wanted. Luckily, I got my degree before the changes went into effect.
- sokoloff 4y ago> Luzzi explained to students that he didn't need IRB approval for his sensors because they weren't "monitoring people." A student countered, what was being monitored, "if not people?" Luzzi replied that he was monitoring "heat sources." An actual human adult said that with a straight face?
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis discussion makes a good point about how surveillance is deployed into society, first targeting prisoners and refugees, then low-level wage workers. For example, I wonder how these grad students would react if they were subjected to the Amazon warehouse surveillance system: > "...how the distance assistant works: green circles surround workers if they maintain six feet of distance. If workers get too close to each other, the circles light up red." > "...Drivers for Amazon, many of whom are third-party contractors driving Amazon vans, learned earlier this year that their vans would start to feature a four-part camera with biometric feedback indicators." https://www.businessinsider.com/how-amazon-monitors-employees-ai-cameras-union-surveillance-spy-agency-2021-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-amazon-monitors-employee...
- don-code 4y agoI was writing a response to this, the point of which was going to be that there's a gradient with regard to the amount of respect shown (or not shown) to people as they climb the social ladder, but at the same time, there are some forms of surveillance which by nature _can't_ be so selective in who's targeted. Now I'm not sure that's true. My argument was going to center around common places where surveillance happens - engagement tracking at grocery stores, license plate readers on traffic light cameras, and the like. It's hard to opt out of roads or grocery stores. But then I realized that even these reflect the gradient. Maybe big box stores like Walmart are deploying these technologies - are white-collar workers actually shopping there, or are they instead going to smaller, boutique-y shops who don't install them? Are traffic light cameras going into upper-class suburban settings, or are they first being deployed to major roads and arteries? So... I've more or less proved my initial thought wrong - this gradient does indeed persist, because people at higher rungs of the ladder are self-selecting for experiences which don't feature these kinds of surveillance (even if that is not their primary reason for doing so).
- itronitron 4y agoI feel like when the surveillance is set up within an organization (prison, school, company) it's done in order to enhance the power imbalance rather than enforce any particular behavior.
- ColinWright 4y agoAs always, some people hate the graphical layout, but if you want to read the discussion on Twitter, I find that there is no method that compares with it. Here's the Twitter discussion: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1578145220369084416.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1578145220369084416.svg Zoom out and see the shape of the entire conversation, scroll around to see the individual comments, click on a box to go to the original tweet. The original submission here is to the discussion on Mastodon, though there have been no replies there yet.
- musingsole 4y agoThat's awesome! I find it funny I've never thought to graph a Twitter conversation before...but I suppose that would require thinking about Twitter. Which I avoid.
- ColinWright 4y agoSimple discussions are easy to follow, but complex and extensive discussion are really, really hard to follow. Charting them like this is the only way I know where you can trace over discussions and make sure you catch everything. I get involved in a lot of large discussions, and extracting and distilling the knowledge is important to me, which I why I start with the chart, then have tools to navigate over it, cull the useless bits, and retain what's important. If you cultivate and curate your connections, Twitter can be a brilliant source, but the interface is atrocious.
- 867-5309 4y agothis would be lovely as html
- ColinWright 4y agoI've asked many, many times to try to get people to help me learn enough to be able to do this in HTML. They've all expressed enthusiasm, then gradually faded away and been unable to do it. There are complexities that most people find sufficiently daunting that they decide it's too much trouble. "We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy". That's why I've settled (so far)on a clickable SVG. Pareto's Principle: 80% of the benefit from 20% of the work.
- jrootabega 4y agoThe fact that they got the sensors removed isn't even really a victory, as noted. They'll be back, eventually. And the way the usage is being monitored is only one part of the issue here. The original issue remains: the people at the desks are seen as cattle to be more efficiently packed, undeserving of their own space. That's not a mindset that goes away. I've seen it in assigned desks -> shared first-come-first-served seating. I've twice worked at places where my office was surreptitiously packed up and moved while I was in a meeting. When they show you how they think of you, you have to understand that they'll never change how they think. They'll just remember not to show you.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago> the people at the desks are seen as cattle to be more efficiently packed Absolutely. It's so dehumanizing. It boggles my mind that they think they have the right to do things like this, it betrays a lack of basic respect for other humans that's hard to articulate. We must discuss this pathology. What is the origin of this mindset? How do these businesses and institutions start thinking like this? Treating people as inhuman resources to be efficiently allocated and managed as they see fit, and any method used to do so is justified?
- rthomas6 4y agoI mean, I understand it even though I don't agree with it. If you're trying to budget for an organization, and it comes down to either needing to buy an entire new office building, or making everyone make do with 20% less space, that packing people in option looks pretty attractive.
- ghaff 4y agoBefore COVID threw everything into disarray, a friend was telling me they had at least one building that was really bursting at the seams for space. I don't think they did any automated usage monitoring but they did manually check utilization on a regular basis and asked people who weren't using their assigned desk frequently enough to give up their permanent seat. Which seems very reasonable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 4y agoseems like it would've been easier for the school to have a single well placed camera and some light ML than all of these sensors
- mjhay 4y agoUniversity administration is destroying higher education. So much graft and waste - rather than cutting down on administrative bloat, the solution is always to cut resources from those doing useful productive work.
- nixpulvis 4y agoI'm not sure about how to combat heat sensors under current workplace law. But, some workplaces have cameras, which as far as I can tell break surveillance law in many states. Especially given the ability to reconstruct a transcript of what was said and keyboard input from the video.
- jrootabega 4y agoI clearly don't think what the administration did here is good. But I don't exactly align with the students, either. Thought experiment: let's go back to the days when we always had hardwired desktop computers at every desk. Their locations and network addresses are known. Usage is logged locally and centrally, e.g. in Active Directory. Would logging require IRB approval? Once the logs were collected, would running a report on the logs to show how much usage each workstation was getting, and by whom, require IRB approval? It doesn't really seem like a science experiment to me, just logistics. (And I think the "we're not doing science here" issue was not understood or handled in good faith by the students. Technically, any time someone says "Hmm, I wonder...let me check something...aha!" is science.) But I also acknowledge that there are situations where you would need to err on the side of treating it like an experiment even if there is doubt.
- mattkrause 4y agoThe rules (laws, really) on this are actually pretty clear. You can collect a lot of data for internal “operational”. A hospital could track surgical infections to see if an Operating Room needs decontamination or someone needs retraining. Likewise, the AD logs are fair game for sysadmin or admin purposes. However, you need IRB approval for “research activities” that are meant to draw generalizable conclusions that extend beyond the immediate situation. How do cleaning schedules, in general, affect surgical outcomes? Do more logins lead to better student outcomes? The IRB can retroactively authorize you to look at operational data for that, or to collect new data, or even add in (some) perturbations.
- jrootabega 4y agoHmm... I'm still confused but that could be me. I would put the desk monitoring under the former category. Is this a decent example? Operational: We analyzed the performance logs on Tony's computer to show that he didn't use his CPU that much and thus could be given a cheaper model. Research: we used those same logs, and everybody else's, to show that most people use about 25% of their CPU capacity.
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- fritztastic 4y agoReally sounds to me like all those flimsy excuses are just fabrications to obfuscate an ulterior motive behind the sensors. It's very sinister and dishonest, like the person authorizing their usage and answering questions about that decision either doesn't fully understand why they're doing what they're doing, has no regard for the ethical issues involved with invasive surveillance as well as no concern for misuse of resources, or hiding something. Perhaps all of the above.
- theow7384iri 4y ago
- webdoodle 4y agoI worked at a medical clinic that was looking to do something similar. When the COO found out I was a Raspberry PI hobbyist, he approached me to find out if his plan was possible. What he wanted to do was to put IR sensors in all the medical exam rooms, so he could determine usage, without impacting patient privacy. This was technically quite easy to do, but not something that went forward, mostly due to too many other projects. This same COO later became the head of a private school...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ThisNameIsTaken 4y agoA similar story unfolded at my university? [1,2]. Initially deployed as "scanners" instead of cameras. Similar to this story at Northeastern the board argued they needed to be able to assess room occupancy. With the cameras now disabled they increased the counting done by humans, who now just walk into the classrooms (they used to avoid doing so). I suppose they can later argue the cameras are less annoying and a computer counting would actually be more privacy friendly than a human. Without evaluating the necessity of the counting in the first place. A question also raised in the article. [1] https://www.mareonline.nl/en/news/report-on-cameragate-confirms-security-was-inadequate-privacy-was-violated/ https://www.mareonline.nl/en/news/report-on-cameragate-confi... [2] https://unseeusleiden.noblogs.org/ https://unseeusleiden.noblogs.org/
- the_only_law 4y agoAh yes universities, the one place you can treat customers paying you loads of cash like shit.
- vjulian 4y agoI once had a job developing strategy for one of the top business schools in the world in its revenue center. In this best-of-the best setting, there was little incompetence but lots of mediocrity. At university administrations, as you drift away from elite schools and drift away from revenue centers, in my observation incompetence becomes common. Administrators are in those roles, because they’d be fired from any high-performing workplace. We can see this play out clearly in the fast-declining high-ed market landscape. I lasted about two years before it became unbearable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]