10 ms·

Gaggle Drops LGBTQ Keywords from Student Surveillance Tool

71 points by favourable 4y ago

Spivak 4y ago
I mean sure compulsory dragnet surveillance of 20% of Americans with basically no oversight, where the data is shared with exactly the people in their lives in a position to harm them with it, that’s fine. But now we don’t automatically tell you who the gay kids are, you have to look for yourselves. What a joke.
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  But if school districts can't mandate children bring home webcams to remotely view and browsers to spy on, how can they possibly keep them safe from breaking pointless rules in the privacy of their own home? Or having any private conversations whatsoever? Won't anyone think of the children?
  - firecall 4y ago
    I essentially tell my tweeners to not say a damn thing online. The nonsense that comes out of kids mouths on these discord chats when they are gaming - both written and spoken - is just... childish. They use words and phrases they don't understand, they push the boundaries and get carried away. Like kids are supposed to. But out of context these things could easily be used to 'cancel' them when these kids are older.
- daenney 4y ago
  It seems the line of thinking here is “bad things happen to other people so fuck queer kids”? I don’t quite see why dragnet surveillance and exposing queer kids to additional risk and abuse can’t be bad at the same time.
  - deworms 4y ago
    [dead]
ravi-delia 4y ago
The entitlement that school officials feel to spy on students in their care is sickening. I go a fair bit further than the median person on this, but I suspect that if people realized just how pervasively their children were tracked we would see far wider outcry. This is far worse than anything Google could do on their own- as much as I don't want tech companies to have too much of my personal info, I really don't want my boss to have it! With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Eh, they're in a tough spot, at least at the middle school level. My kids' school gave every student a Chromebook upon return to in-person school, and the result thus far has been massive amounts of distraction as half the class winds up on YouTube or something instead of getting work done. I wish they'd ditch them entirely, but the school went all-in on Teams.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Ours have had school ipads or macbooks since Kindergarten(!) and agreed, it's awful. They should drop the tech until high school. It's not helping anything and is a huge distraction. All the online homework shit's so very much worse than when they just had workbooks full of tear-out sheets, for the lower grades. You can probably buy a hundred or more of those books for a reasonable subject-curriculum for a year, bulk, for the cost of one low-end iPad. Just go back to that stuff. It was fine. This isn't better. Worse, I can't put my own parental controls on it. Any devices of ours our kids use have strict ScreenTime limitations on hours of use, total amount of use in a day, which programs can be used at all, which sites can be reached—meanwhile, the school devices have few restrictions and they can reach all kind of garbage sites on them, and I can't tighten that down.
    - xwolfi 4y ago
      You can with a smart router like the Synology RT2600: it can do mac-adress level site firewalls so say ban youtube between such and such for all your kids' devices (it can assign a persona to a bunch of mac addresses).
Eumenes 4y ago
I'm not following ... does gaggle only track kids who use the email/chat apps administered through msft or google?
- RockRobotRock 4y ago
  https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management Yes, and LMS such as Canvas
fIREpOK 4y ago
> Company will no longer flag students who use words like “gay” and “lesbian” online, citing greater acceptance of queer kids in schools Which words were you previously supposed to use for these cases?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The flagging was probably because 90+% of occurrence of these words—certainly gay, maybe also lesbian—in a school setting were, until fairly recently(? maybe still? I dunno what The Youths are up to) intended as insults or hate speech. These tools appear to have been for monitoring assignments and chats (nb. that kids are plenty smart enough to use shared-editing assignments as chats, too, even if chats aren't available, or sometimes they think draft assignments will be less-surveilled) [EDIT] And, presumably, teachers would ignore the flagging if you'd used the words in, say, a school assignment, for a good reason. [EDIT2] I'm not complaining about the downvotes, but, could someone please explain WTF? I truly have no clue.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    I don't think it's that bad of a comment, but "probably because 90+%" is a LOT of hedging to make a point. I could see it doing better if the comment tried to back up the claim with something a bit more substantive or even an anecdote (despite the obvious flaws with reasoning from anecdotes, they can still be fun to read in a way that adds to the conversation). Then again maybe I'm missing the same thing you are.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > I'm not complaining about the downvotes, but, could someone please explain WTF? I truly have no clue. You made a post in a culture war thread. You could post the most benign thing ever and people will find a way to be upset by it.
- cookie_monsta 4y ago
LightHugger 4y ago
>Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops. Is this not malware by any definition? Protect the children, prosecute these fuckwits.
- xfitm3 4y ago
  And advocate BYOD without MDM!
louwrentius 4y ago
The key question is why these words where ever in that Surveillance Tool to begin with. Scrap that. The real question is why those surveillance tools are acceptable in our society and in addition: why aren't the makers aren't in jail yet.
freitzkriesler 4y ago
Had a zoomer tell me that they use homophobe as a slur. As a bisexual man, my immediate reaction was,"that's really gay." We need a new freaky Friday where a millennial goes to school with zoomies.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  I went to a conservative Catholic all boys high school 25 years ago so I've got zero idea what teenagers are doing these days. I presume in the age of smartphones, the average teenager probably knows more than I do about minority sexual identities and practices. If I became a 14 year old tomorrow I'd probably find it so shocking and foreign.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Parent of a queer 17yr old here who's admittedly special interest is gender and sexuality(his not necessarily mine). One of the differences I've observed is the appropriation of therapeutic terminology - gaslighting, toxic, etc. Maybe This is an over-generalization from specifics, but this terminology seems to have made its way into young people's lexicon with a fluency not present in people my age (and completely absent from most people my parent's age). Along the way they've taken on a bit more, um, flexible definitions. Whereas I might be more exacting in their use, young people seem to have more expansive definitions. I wouldn't necessarily call it shocking or foreign, but more like a highly specific subculture, which in some ways it is, but it has, because of its very nature, the potential to become the dominate culture or evolve into the dominate culture with time. I suppose this is where the "stranger in their own land" phrase lies, and with it "adapt or die."
    - freitzkriesler 4y ago
      My first boyfriend was in high school and what I miss most about those days was being gay wasnt a status symbol but just a relationship status. Neither him nor I were into "pride" which is annoying at best and insufferable open sexual degeneracy at the worst. Seeing what's in our public schools today is a comedy of cringe and highly manufactured, on par with the 60s hippie culture. It's truly a shame.
ecshafer 4y ago
This technology seems like something that should not exist in the first place. Why do schools feel the need to spy on the students? Who cares if a student swears in a chat message. Spying on all students should not be considered acceptable, when waiting for an aggrieved party to bring up the issue to staff is a possibility. Administrators have always been especially power hungry in my experience in schools, so this isn't surprising. But there should be legislation banning this. Breaking open student lockers to read their journals would be considered unacceptable, why is this? Lower Merion v Wolk where the school was taking photos through laptop cameras and had to pay a large sum of money, is something I hope happens to every school that uses this.
andreygrehov 4y ago
Interesting. This is the first time I hear about Student Surveillance Tool. The school my kids go to has never mentioned anything of that sort. Two questions: 1/ why and 2/ what other surveillance tools/programs I am, as a parent, not aware of?
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  They're decisions made at the state, municipal and district levels. If you want to find out what else is going on, FOIA might yield results, as might some prodding from school boards.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Though they're aimed at higher education I will not resist reposting two articles of mine that seem to get more relevant every day [1,2]. The existence of tools and companies like this is pitiful, corrosive to our democracy and clear evidence that education, governance and society has generally lost its way. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/eliminating-harmful-digital-technologies-universities-guide https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/eliminating-harm... [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-technological-dystopia https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...
- bjelkeman-again 4y ago
  Read the first article. Good (the second was blocked by an account-wall), which is somewhat ironic considering the subject. One thing that rang true was the idea that an access card disenfranchises. I went back to my old University but could not get in to look for a professor as an access card was required. I know why. Thefts of equipment. But it is a hard thing. How to balance access with combating insecurity.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Sorry you hit an access wall. Turning off JavaScript will fix that btw. The overuse and inappropriate use of physical access systems has turned many public places like schools and hospitals into high security prisons. Sadly that's just one technology in a growing list aggressively pushed onto institutions through a cocktail of fear-mongering, insane regulation, cost-cutting efficiency (getting rid of actual guards and supervisors) - all part of the ever expanding security-industrial racket. In my opinion, a very important talk is given by Eve Ensler on "the right to be insecure" [1]. The only other hacker I've seen pick up on her refreshing stance is Bruce Schneier. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_what_security_means_to_me https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_what_security_means_to_...
Barrin92 4y ago
I was in secondary education (only) ca. 15 years ago but this makes me feel 60 years old. What on earth is a student surveillance tool? Sure we had DNS filtered sites on school workstations but that was about it. "Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops." This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this. Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.
- version_five 4y ago
  > school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft This appears to be what happened. Google and microsoft figured out how to exploit children for money by forcing them to use their shitty products in place of actual classroom education. I agree with you, I wouldn't want my school in a computer centric education, let-alone a heavily monitored one. It sounds like what you'd expect in a juvenile prison
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  > This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this You might have to move if you want to escape this, and you'll never really know if/when a school or district implements these surveillance programs, either. > Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era. That's because it is. The Stasi/KGB/etc couldn't have dreamed of the capabilities authorities have today to surveil everyone at a massive scale to find even the smallest of their infractions.
lettergram 4y ago
so the kids can start calling things pejoratively “gay” again?
- thefounder 4y ago
  Yes. They are kids are after all
truthwhisperer 4y ago
[dead]
dtauzell 4y ago
Our school board is working on a policy to make sure parents know if a kid wants to go by a different name (other than an approved nickname). I bet they'd love for this software to be able to figure that out and let the appropriate administration know.
gus_massa 4y ago
I remember an old article, pre pandemic (2017?). The computers provided by the school were not only monitoring the students screens, but also taking photographs at random intervals, even when the computer was at the homes. The led of the camera blinked, but it was dismissed as a glitch by the school. I don't remember what was happening with the photos, IIRC they were send to a central server and it was not clear who could see them. I can't find the link now.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Might be this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School... Although there are a lot of cases where things like this, or exactly this, have happened, many of them are recent.
- SapporoChris 4y ago
  Maybe it was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134022 School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home (boingboing.net) follow up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807843 School District Agrees to Pay $600K For Using School Laptops to Spy on Students
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    Yes, it is. It's the same incident than the sibling comment. (Upvote and thanks to both.) In the fist article you linked, one of the comments that hit me the most was by m3dFlatLander about a documentary about a similar event: > To be fair to the school shown in that particular documentary, they weren't looking at the students through a webcam. It looks like they're using a remote desktop program to look at the students desktop. He explained that many students use the webcam program as a mirror to look at themselves or just mess around. Link to the parent comment for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134224
pyuser583 4y ago
Unpopular opinion: schools have a responsibility to moderate (yes, censor) the media students consume. By default, the Internet is rated X. That's just a fact. Mainstream platforms pull any material that's explicitly pornographic, but there is a delay, and children will be exposerd to adult content. LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography. If the software is confident it can distinguish between the very different meanings of "lesbian" vis-a-vis content, then great. But I don't believe that for a second. I have a child who is regularly exposed to terrible things online. It's like playing whack-a-mole. Schools are one of the big chinks in the armor. I can't control what she's exposed to there. If I couldn't afford private school, I couldn't even chose what school she went to. I'd be stuck with whatever policies the local public school has. We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.
- throwaway89713 4y ago
  Parents have responsibility to teach children to self-moderate what content they consume. Yes, I mean even the youngest kids. Do they have access to the internet? If they want to see porn, they will see it - regardless of any content filters you put on. Kids are fully capable of using and understanding the need for and the high-level concepts behind VPNs by the time they are 7. They will get creative with their keywords and ways to see porn (e.g. erotic games that might not be caught by your filter). I've seen 10 year old kids use portable Tor browser to bypass school content filters. Anything else will lead to problems in later life (overconsumption of porn for example).
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    At home, I block the internet at the router level - including VPNs. I also don’t give my daughter admin access. So even if she knew what a VPN was, she wouldn’t be able to use it.
    - throwaway89713 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure a motivated kid would just need some time to bypass your filter. Don't underestimate children. If they can access the web, they can access porn. You'd have to block all - including HTTP(S) - traffic and even that covers just what happens at home. It might be as simple as connecting to the neighbor's open WiFi, the local McDonalds public WiFi, or their best friend's mobile data plan or their unrestricted home WiFi. There are HTTP proxies operating via port 80/443, full with an app just like a VPN. I've seen a 10 year old kid use a free SSH shell account (via port 80) to proxy their traffic. There was another kid who just used a public cloud provider's free tier and had a full desktop environment running there, accessed via some web VNC interface - that one was 12 y/o though. Regardless, you're just putting off the inevitable - and then it will be like a whole new overwhelmingly fascinating world has just opened, which is not great for a young mind not yet fully capable of moderation because you didn't allow them to practice it. > I also don’t give my daughter admin access Kids can boot Linux from USB too.
Slava_Propanei 4y ago
[dead]

71 points by favourable 4y ago

I mean sure compulsory dragnet surveillance of 20% of Americans with basically no oversight, where the data is shared with exactly the people in their lives in a position to harm them with it, that’s fine. But now we don’t automatically tell you who the gay kids are, you have to look for yourselves. What a joke.

ravi-delia 4y ago
But if school districts can't mandate children bring home webcams to remotely view and browsers to spy on, how can they possibly keep them safe from breaking pointless rules in the privacy of their own home? Or having any private conversations whatsoever? Won't anyone think of the children?
- firecall 4y ago
  I essentially tell my tweeners to not say a damn thing online. The nonsense that comes out of kids mouths on these discord chats when they are gaming - both written and spoken - is just... childish. They use words and phrases they don't understand, they push the boundaries and get carried away. Like kids are supposed to. But out of context these things could easily be used to 'cancel' them when these kids are older.
daenney 4y ago
It seems the line of thinking here is “bad things happen to other people so fuck queer kids”? I don’t quite see why dragnet surveillance and exposing queer kids to additional risk and abuse can’t be bad at the same time.
- deworms 4y ago
  [dead]

ravi-delia 4y ago

The entitlement that school officials feel to spy on students in their care is sickening. I go a fair bit further than the median person on this, but I suspect that if people realized just how pervasively their children were tracked we would see far wider outcry. This is far worse than anything Google could do on their own- as much as I don't want tech companies to have too much of my personal info, I really don't want my boss to have it! With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there.

ceejayoz 4y ago
Eh, they're in a tough spot, at least at the middle school level. My kids' school gave every student a Chromebook upon return to in-person school, and the result thus far has been massive amounts of distraction as half the class winds up on YouTube or something instead of getting work done. I wish they'd ditch them entirely, but the school went all-in on Teams.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Ours have had school ipads or macbooks since Kindergarten(!) and agreed, it's awful. They should drop the tech until high school. It's not helping anything and is a huge distraction. All the online homework shit's so very much worse than when they just had workbooks full of tear-out sheets, for the lower grades. You can probably buy a hundred or more of those books for a reasonable subject-curriculum for a year, bulk, for the cost of one low-end iPad. Just go back to that stuff. It was fine. This isn't better. Worse, I can't put my own parental controls on it. Any devices of ours our kids use have strict ScreenTime limitations on hours of use, total amount of use in a day, which programs can be used at all, which sites can be reached—meanwhile, the school devices have few restrictions and they can reach all kind of garbage sites on them, and I can't tighten that down.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    You can with a smart router like the Synology RT2600: it can do mac-adress level site firewalls so say ban youtube between such and such for all your kids' devices (it can assign a persona to a bunch of mac addresses).

Eumenes 4y ago

I'm not following ... does gaggle only track kids who use the email/chat apps administered through msft or google?

RockRobotRock 4y ago
https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management Yes, and LMS such as Canvas

fIREpOK 4y ago

> Company will no longer flag students who use words like “gay” and “lesbian” online, citing greater acceptance of queer kids in schools Which words were you previously supposed to use for these cases?

yamtaddle 4y ago
The flagging was probably because 90+% of occurrence of these words—certainly gay, maybe also lesbian—in a school setting were, until fairly recently(? maybe still? I dunno what The Youths are up to) intended as insults or hate speech. These tools appear to have been for monitoring assignments and chats (nb. that kids are plenty smart enough to use shared-editing assignments as chats, too, even if chats aren't available, or sometimes they think draft assignments will be less-surveilled) [EDIT] And, presumably, teachers would ignore the flagging if you'd used the words in, say, a school assignment, for a good reason. [EDIT2] I'm not complaining about the downvotes, but, could someone please explain WTF? I truly have no clue.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I don't think it's that bad of a comment, but "probably because 90+%" is a LOT of hedging to make a point. I could see it doing better if the comment tried to back up the claim with something a bit more substantive or even an anecdote (despite the obvious flaws with reasoning from anecdotes, they can still be fun to read in a way that adds to the conversation). Then again maybe I'm missing the same thing you are.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > I'm not complaining about the downvotes, but, could someone please explain WTF? I truly have no clue. You made a post in a culture war thread. You could post the most benign thing ever and people will find a way to be upset by it.
cookie_monsta 4y ago

LightHugger 4y ago

>Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops. Is this not malware by any definition? Protect the children, prosecute these fuckwits.

xfitm3 4y ago
And advocate BYOD without MDM!

louwrentius 4y ago

The key question is why these words where ever in that Surveillance Tool to begin with. Scrap that. The real question is why those surveillance tools are acceptable in our society and in addition: why aren't the makers aren't in jail yet.

freitzkriesler 4y ago

Had a zoomer tell me that they use homophobe as a slur. As a bisexual man, my immediate reaction was,"that's really gay." We need a new freaky Friday where a millennial goes to school with zoomies.

kristopolous 4y ago
I went to a conservative Catholic all boys high school 25 years ago so I've got zero idea what teenagers are doing these days. I presume in the age of smartphones, the average teenager probably knows more than I do about minority sexual identities and practices. If I became a 14 year old tomorrow I'd probably find it so shocking and foreign.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Parent of a queer 17yr old here who's admittedly special interest is gender and sexuality(his not necessarily mine). One of the differences I've observed is the appropriation of therapeutic terminology - gaslighting, toxic, etc. Maybe This is an over-generalization from specifics, but this terminology seems to have made its way into young people's lexicon with a fluency not present in people my age (and completely absent from most people my parent's age). Along the way they've taken on a bit more, um, flexible definitions. Whereas I might be more exacting in their use, young people seem to have more expansive definitions. I wouldn't necessarily call it shocking or foreign, but more like a highly specific subculture, which in some ways it is, but it has, because of its very nature, the potential to become the dominate culture or evolve into the dominate culture with time. I suppose this is where the "stranger in their own land" phrase lies, and with it "adapt or die."
  - freitzkriesler 4y ago
    My first boyfriend was in high school and what I miss most about those days was being gay wasnt a status symbol but just a relationship status. Neither him nor I were into "pride" which is annoying at best and insufferable open sexual degeneracy at the worst. Seeing what's in our public schools today is a comedy of cringe and highly manufactured, on par with the 60s hippie culture. It's truly a shame.

ecshafer 4y ago

This technology seems like something that should not exist in the first place. Why do schools feel the need to spy on the students? Who cares if a student swears in a chat message. Spying on all students should not be considered acceptable, when waiting for an aggrieved party to bring up the issue to staff is a possibility. Administrators have always been especially power hungry in my experience in schools, so this isn't surprising. But there should be legislation banning this. Breaking open student lockers to read their journals would be considered unacceptable, why is this? Lower Merion v Wolk where the school was taking photos through laptop cameras and had to pay a large sum of money, is something I hope happens to every school that uses this.

andreygrehov 4y ago

Interesting. This is the first time I hear about Student Surveillance Tool. The school my kids go to has never mentioned anything of that sort. Two questions: 1/ why and 2/ what other surveillance tools/programs I am, as a parent, not aware of?

heavyset_go 4y ago
They're decisions made at the state, municipal and district levels. If you want to find out what else is going on, FOIA might yield results, as might some prodding from school boards.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Though they're aimed at higher education I will not resist reposting two articles of mine that seem to get more relevant every day [1,2]. The existence of tools and companies like this is pitiful, corrosive to our democracy and clear evidence that education, governance and society has generally lost its way. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/eliminating-harmful-digital-technologies-universities-guide https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/eliminating-harm... [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-technological-dystopia https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...

bjelkeman-again 4y ago
Read the first article. Good (the second was blocked by an account-wall), which is somewhat ironic considering the subject. One thing that rang true was the idea that an access card disenfranchises. I went back to my old University but could not get in to look for a professor as an access card was required. I know why. Thefts of equipment. But it is a hard thing. How to balance access with combating insecurity.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Sorry you hit an access wall. Turning off JavaScript will fix that btw. The overuse and inappropriate use of physical access systems has turned many public places like schools and hospitals into high security prisons. Sadly that's just one technology in a growing list aggressively pushed onto institutions through a cocktail of fear-mongering, insane regulation, cost-cutting efficiency (getting rid of actual guards and supervisors) - all part of the ever expanding security-industrial racket. In my opinion, a very important talk is given by Eve Ensler on "the right to be insecure" [1]. The only other hacker I've seen pick up on her refreshing stance is Bruce Schneier. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_what_security_means_to_me https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_what_security_means_to_...

Barrin92 4y ago

I was in secondary education (only) ca. 15 years ago but this makes me feel 60 years old. What on earth is a student surveillance tool? Sure we had DNS filtered sites on school workstations but that was about it. "Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops." This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this. Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.

version_five 4y ago
> school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft This appears to be what happened. Google and microsoft figured out how to exploit children for money by forcing them to use their shitty products in place of actual classroom education. I agree with you, I wouldn't want my school in a computer centric education, let-alone a heavily monitored one. It sounds like what you'd expect in a juvenile prison
heavyset_go 4y ago
> This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this You might have to move if you want to escape this, and you'll never really know if/when a school or district implements these surveillance programs, either. > Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era. That's because it is. The Stasi/KGB/etc couldn't have dreamed of the capabilities authorities have today to surveil everyone at a massive scale to find even the smallest of their infractions.

lettergram 4y ago

so the kids can start calling things pejoratively “gay” again?

thefounder 4y ago
Yes. They are kids are after all

truthwhisperer 4y ago

[dead]

dtauzell 4y ago

Our school board is working on a policy to make sure parents know if a kid wants to go by a different name (other than an approved nickname). I bet they'd love for this software to be able to figure that out and let the appropriate administration know.

gus_massa 4y ago

I remember an old article, pre pandemic (2017?). The computers provided by the school were not only monitoring the students screens, but also taking photographs at random intervals, even when the computer was at the homes. The led of the camera blinked, but it was dismissed as a glitch by the school. I don't remember what was happening with the photos, IIRC they were send to a central server and it was not clear who could see them. I can't find the link now.

heavyset_go 4y ago
Might be this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School... Although there are a lot of cases where things like this, or exactly this, have happened, many of them are recent.
SapporoChris 4y ago
Maybe it was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134022 School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home (boingboing.net) follow up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807843 School District Agrees to Pay $600K For Using School Laptops to Spy on Students
- gus_massa 4y ago
  Yes, it is. It's the same incident than the sibling comment. (Upvote and thanks to both.) In the fist article you linked, one of the comments that hit me the most was by m3dFlatLander about a documentary about a similar event: > To be fair to the school shown in that particular documentary, they weren't looking at the students through a webcam. It looks like they're using a remote desktop program to look at the students desktop. He explained that many students use the webcam program as a mirror to look at themselves or just mess around. Link to the parent comment for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134224

pyuser583 4y ago

Unpopular opinion: schools have a responsibility to moderate (yes, censor) the media students consume. By default, the Internet is rated X. That's just a fact. Mainstream platforms pull any material that's explicitly pornographic, but there is a delay, and children will be exposerd to adult content. LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography. If the software is confident it can distinguish between the very different meanings of "lesbian" vis-a-vis content, then great. But I don't believe that for a second. I have a child who is regularly exposed to terrible things online. It's like playing whack-a-mole. Schools are one of the big chinks in the armor. I can't control what she's exposed to there. If I couldn't afford private school, I couldn't even chose what school she went to. I'd be stuck with whatever policies the local public school has. We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.

throwaway89713 4y ago
Parents have responsibility to teach children to self-moderate what content they consume. Yes, I mean even the youngest kids. Do they have access to the internet? If they want to see porn, they will see it - regardless of any content filters you put on. Kids are fully capable of using and understanding the need for and the high-level concepts behind VPNs by the time they are 7. They will get creative with their keywords and ways to see porn (e.g. erotic games that might not be caught by your filter). I've seen 10 year old kids use portable Tor browser to bypass school content filters. Anything else will lead to problems in later life (overconsumption of porn for example).
- pyuser583 4y ago
  At home, I block the internet at the router level - including VPNs. I also don’t give my daughter admin access. So even if she knew what a VPN was, she wouldn’t be able to use it.
  - throwaway89713 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure a motivated kid would just need some time to bypass your filter. Don't underestimate children. If they can access the web, they can access porn. You'd have to block all - including HTTP(S) - traffic and even that covers just what happens at home. It might be as simple as connecting to the neighbor's open WiFi, the local McDonalds public WiFi, or their best friend's mobile data plan or their unrestricted home WiFi. There are HTTP proxies operating via port 80/443, full with an app just like a VPN. I've seen a 10 year old kid use a free SSH shell account (via port 80) to proxy their traffic. There was another kid who just used a public cloud provider's free tier and had a full desktop environment running there, accessed via some web VNC interface - that one was 12 y/o though. Regardless, you're just putting off the inevitable - and then it will be like a whole new overwhelmingly fascinating world has just opened, which is not great for a young mind not yet fully capable of moderation because you didn't allow them to practice it. > I also don’t give my daughter admin access Kids can boot Linux from USB too.

Slava_Propanei 4y ago

[dead]