7 ms·

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

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).
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Yeah, I know I can get more hardware to fix it (or set up a BSD router again like I did way back in '04 or whenever) but it sucks that I already have a good system that works perfectly for my needs and required no tech horse-shit on my part (I'm just... so over doing that stuff when someone's not paying me to) and the schools are punching holes in it. Got this great smoothly-running machine here, and they're tossing a wrench in the works. I did try that already with Google's router (we have Fiber) but of course it doesn't have mac-level blocking. I could swear it used to, but if it did, it doesn't now.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      This could possibly end up problematic as I've seen videos embedded in kids homework. Not sure if that was just something that particular teacher did or what.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft all have education programs where they offer school districts free or discounted hardware and services. Not that it makes it any better, it actually makes it worse because it illustrates the lengths they're going to invade kids' privacy and mine their data.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- xwolfi 4y ago
  So funny, at work in my company we do have computers, since we re an investment bank doing electronic trading, but no youtube, nor even mobile phone allowed. If they catch us with a mobile phone on the trading floor, it's reported to compliance. Why are school allowing kids to have youtube during class, they could at least firewall it like companies do.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Blocking certain sites can make having the Internet at all far less useful to teachers. Youtube's one of those. Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't have allow-list capabilities that'd allow blocking YouTube proper but allowing some subdomain that required login and displayed only permitted videos (parents have only been begging for it since, IDK, forever—YouTube Kids is a cesspool, all we want is allow-lists, but nooooo). Youtube was especially vital during remote learning (what's a better way for a teacher to distribute a video lesson?) and some schools are still trying to use similar schemes for snow days and such. Plus there's just a ton of useful material on Youtube and teachers don't always think of some video they might want to show when they're at home and can snag it on their own connection, or maybe they want the kids to watch them individually at their own pace (being able to pause or rewind is so nice!) (for the record, I'd rather they just ditch the tech entirely until at least high school, but if they're gonna have it, they probably ought to have YouTube access or else it's far less useful. I'm also not sure why schools started letting kids carry phones to class, what a fucking terrible idea)
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      Different YouTube videos are at different URLs.
      - contravariant 4y ago
        You can't really block URLs at a network level though, you'd need access to the device. If you own the device you could of course install the required root certificates to interfere with HTTPS traffic, but arguably that's more intrusive, and a massive security hole if you make a mistake (like Lenovo did, for example).
- bdw5204 4y ago
  The idea of giving kids laptops with unsupervised internet access to use for in-person school sounds really weird to me. At the very least you'd think the teacher would be able to see and control their screen to stop them from misusing the computers during class. I remember that functionality was available in a computer lab when I was in high school and the teachers would absolutely use it if you were off task (but if you finished your work early they generally didn't care if you browsed Wikipedia). That does explain who the target audience for Chromebooks is though. Most tech illiterate adults seem to prefer Windows or Mac for their own machine, in my experience.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    They have the ability to view the students' screens, but they're probably 80% of the time instructing or walking from desk to desk. Very little time sitting on their computer during a class period, so little opportunity to monitor.
yamtaddle 4y ago
We say this, but then we also bring the hammer down if admin's not watching and something bad happens—say, if bullying were happening in the school-provided chat this was monitoring, or a kid wrote something about shooting up the school, or drug deals are being made in the chat, or whatever, and then a kid commits suicide, or a fight happens and it comes out that it was because of bullying in chat, or a kid does in fact shoot someone at school, or a kid ODs. Administrators lose their jobs and may get personally sued. Teachers may get sued. The district may get sued. Neither approach will make everyone happy, but erring on the side of too much surveillance carries a much lower likelihood of ending administrators' careers or bankrupting a school district, than too little. Of course they do the thing that we, collectively, strongly encourage them to do. It's not "entitlement", it's a rational response to insane expectations. > With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there. I assure you, teachers, at least, perceive no such pedestal. Quite the opposite.
- livueta 4y ago
  Yeah, I wish I could agree with the grandparent, but "child safety" is a very effective cheat code for bypassing reasoning because the harms (dead kid!) are immediate, concrete and visceral, while the benefits of not are way more abstract. How do you even begin to quantify the psychological impact of total surveillance? In such a liability-centric culture, it's easy to see why the cards fall as they do. I was listening to a 90s era George Carlin show on a long car ride recently and during a bit about the nation's budding obsession with child safety, he said something I found kinda poignant in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis (n.b. predates the pandemic by a lot): "we've sucked all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives." Amid all the discussions of the apparent relationship between helicopter parents and neurotic, depressed kids, I think it's pretty reasonable to consider whether the sum total of "dangerous fun" deaths/ruined lives - lawn darts, pellet guns, fireworks, pedo van, tall swingsets, etc - exceeds the harm inflicted by that bubble-wrap outlook on life. I'd argue probably not. While reading tfa, I had the same thought regarding the company's claim of suicides prevented. Even if you take it at face value (which I don't; like, come on, there's no way they've demonstrated that with any degree of rigor), is the tradeoff worthwhile? I'd argue probably not, but don't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't get me called a monster at a school board meeting.
xwolfi 4y ago
They might instead demand more. You under estimate the divide between how you want to be tracked by your taxes and how you want to track your children using your own money (school tuition)
NikolaNovak 4y ago
>>With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there. Where is that? Surveillance aside, teachers where I'm at are overworked and powerless. When I was a kid in Europe, teachers were gods. Woe be to child whose teachers say is misbehaving or being lazy or not paying attention. 35 years later and in Canada, teachers are... Beat,really. Angry entitled parents and angry entitled public and rules and policies and complete lack of any freedom to make a difference. I do not see North America placing teachers on moral pedestal.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  We place them on a moral pedestal in the same way we placed "essential workers" during the pandemic. That is to say, with words and sentiment only, but in reality, disposable.
- saghm 4y ago
  GP maybe could have phrased it a bit more clearly, but I think what they meant wasn't "moral pedestal" but "moral standard". One example that jumps to mind for me is when I heard about teachers in my school district as a kid being in trouble for having pictures of them posted on social media by friends at a party where they happened to be holding drinks in plastic cups. Never mind that they were well above the legal drinking age, were not on the clock, or the fact that there wasn't any actual proof that the cups even _contained_ alcohol; being in a situation where someone else could post a picture of them drinking something they can't _prove_ isn't alcohol was apparently considered a "bad example" for students and required discussion to determine if it was disqualifying.
hinkley 4y ago
Most college students are only legally children for 4-8 months at most before they are legally adults. Immature adults (god) yes, but doing this sort of surveillance on full citizens is egregious. Sometimes I get the impression that college administers think they're running the world's fanciest high school.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Are we talking about College students here or K-12 students? It isn't clear to me from (admittedly skimming) the article, but it greatly changes how I feel about the situation. Yes, college students are adults and are entitled to all of the privacy protection of adults. I don't consider children to have the same right to privacy—although here too it depends on the age, high school is very different from elementary school.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    They use the word 'district' which in general is pointing at K-12, I'm pretty sure I've only heard of 'school districts' and not college districts in standard communications.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      > especially among the K-12 student population that Gaggle serves. yep. I'm used to these exposés being for college programs but most of the drama has shifted to highschool and middle school these days. I don't know if that's progress or companies finding softer targets to sell their software to.
ergonaught 4y ago
One sizable group wants them to do X, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing Z. One sizable group wants them to do Z, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing X. And so on, and etc, because people are just emoting and parroting their script. What is the problem that one wants to solve? What are the guiding principles determining that it is a problem, that it needs a solution, and which are used to evaluate the potential solutions? That? That's too much work, and it's hard. So we fall into primate screeching because we haven't, actually, bothered to think.

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).
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Yeah, I know I can get more hardware to fix it (or set up a BSD router again like I did way back in '04 or whenever) but it sucks that I already have a good system that works perfectly for my needs and required no tech horse-shit on my part (I'm just... so over doing that stuff when someone's not paying me to) and the schools are punching holes in it. Got this great smoothly-running machine here, and they're tossing a wrench in the works. I did try that already with Google's router (we have Fiber) but of course it doesn't have mac-level blocking. I could swear it used to, but if it did, it doesn't now.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    This could possibly end up problematic as I've seen videos embedded in kids homework. Not sure if that was just something that particular teacher did or what.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft all have education programs where they offer school districts free or discounted hardware and services. Not that it makes it any better, it actually makes it worse because it illustrates the lengths they're going to invade kids' privacy and mine their data.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
xwolfi 4y ago
So funny, at work in my company we do have computers, since we re an investment bank doing electronic trading, but no youtube, nor even mobile phone allowed. If they catch us with a mobile phone on the trading floor, it's reported to compliance. Why are school allowing kids to have youtube during class, they could at least firewall it like companies do.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Blocking certain sites can make having the Internet at all far less useful to teachers. Youtube's one of those. Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't have allow-list capabilities that'd allow blocking YouTube proper but allowing some subdomain that required login and displayed only permitted videos (parents have only been begging for it since, IDK, forever—YouTube Kids is a cesspool, all we want is allow-lists, but nooooo). Youtube was especially vital during remote learning (what's a better way for a teacher to distribute a video lesson?) and some schools are still trying to use similar schemes for snow days and such. Plus there's just a ton of useful material on Youtube and teachers don't always think of some video they might want to show when they're at home and can snag it on their own connection, or maybe they want the kids to watch them individually at their own pace (being able to pause or rewind is so nice!) (for the record, I'd rather they just ditch the tech entirely until at least high school, but if they're gonna have it, they probably ought to have YouTube access or else it's far less useful. I'm also not sure why schools started letting kids carry phones to class, what a fucking terrible idea)
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Different YouTube videos are at different URLs.
    - contravariant 4y ago
      You can't really block URLs at a network level though, you'd need access to the device. If you own the device you could of course install the required root certificates to interfere with HTTPS traffic, but arguably that's more intrusive, and a massive security hole if you make a mistake (like Lenovo did, for example).
bdw5204 4y ago
The idea of giving kids laptops with unsupervised internet access to use for in-person school sounds really weird to me. At the very least you'd think the teacher would be able to see and control their screen to stop them from misusing the computers during class. I remember that functionality was available in a computer lab when I was in high school and the teachers would absolutely use it if you were off task (but if you finished your work early they generally didn't care if you browsed Wikipedia). That does explain who the target audience for Chromebooks is though. Most tech illiterate adults seem to prefer Windows or Mac for their own machine, in my experience.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  They have the ability to view the students' screens, but they're probably 80% of the time instructing or walking from desk to desk. Very little time sitting on their computer during a class period, so little opportunity to monitor.

yamtaddle 4y ago

We say this, but then we also bring the hammer down if admin's not watching and something bad happens—say, if bullying were happening in the school-provided chat this was monitoring, or a kid wrote something about shooting up the school, or drug deals are being made in the chat, or whatever, and then a kid commits suicide, or a fight happens and it comes out that it was because of bullying in chat, or a kid does in fact shoot someone at school, or a kid ODs. Administrators lose their jobs and may get personally sued. Teachers may get sued. The district may get sued. Neither approach will make everyone happy, but erring on the side of too much surveillance carries a much lower likelihood of ending administrators' careers or bankrupting a school district, than too little. Of course they do the thing that we, collectively, strongly encourage them to do. It's not "entitlement", it's a rational response to insane expectations. > With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there. I assure you, teachers, at least, perceive no such pedestal. Quite the opposite.

livueta 4y ago
Yeah, I wish I could agree with the grandparent, but "child safety" is a very effective cheat code for bypassing reasoning because the harms (dead kid!) are immediate, concrete and visceral, while the benefits of not are way more abstract. How do you even begin to quantify the psychological impact of total surveillance? In such a liability-centric culture, it's easy to see why the cards fall as they do. I was listening to a 90s era George Carlin show on a long car ride recently and during a bit about the nation's budding obsession with child safety, he said something I found kinda poignant in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis (n.b. predates the pandemic by a lot): "we've sucked all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives." Amid all the discussions of the apparent relationship between helicopter parents and neurotic, depressed kids, I think it's pretty reasonable to consider whether the sum total of "dangerous fun" deaths/ruined lives - lawn darts, pellet guns, fireworks, pedo van, tall swingsets, etc - exceeds the harm inflicted by that bubble-wrap outlook on life. I'd argue probably not. While reading tfa, I had the same thought regarding the company's claim of suicides prevented. Even if you take it at face value (which I don't; like, come on, there's no way they've demonstrated that with any degree of rigor), is the tradeoff worthwhile? I'd argue probably not, but don't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't get me called a monster at a school board meeting.

xwolfi 4y ago

They might instead demand more. You under estimate the divide between how you want to be tracked by your taxes and how you want to track your children using your own money (school tuition)

NikolaNovak 4y ago

>>With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there. Where is that? Surveillance aside, teachers where I'm at are overworked and powerless. When I was a kid in Europe, teachers were gods. Woe be to child whose teachers say is misbehaving or being lazy or not paying attention. 35 years later and in Canada, teachers are... Beat,really. Angry entitled parents and angry entitled public and rules and policies and complete lack of any freedom to make a difference. I do not see North America placing teachers on moral pedestal.

jjeaff 4y ago
We place them on a moral pedestal in the same way we placed "essential workers" during the pandemic. That is to say, with words and sentiment only, but in reality, disposable.
saghm 4y ago
GP maybe could have phrased it a bit more clearly, but I think what they meant wasn't "moral pedestal" but "moral standard". One example that jumps to mind for me is when I heard about teachers in my school district as a kid being in trouble for having pictures of them posted on social media by friends at a party where they happened to be holding drinks in plastic cups. Never mind that they were well above the legal drinking age, were not on the clock, or the fact that there wasn't any actual proof that the cups even _contained_ alcohol; being in a situation where someone else could post a picture of them drinking something they can't _prove_ isn't alcohol was apparently considered a "bad example" for students and required discussion to determine if it was disqualifying.

hinkley 4y ago

Most college students are only legally children for 4-8 months at most before they are legally adults. Immature adults (god) yes, but doing this sort of surveillance on full citizens is egregious. Sometimes I get the impression that college administers think they're running the world's fanciest high school.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Are we talking about College students here or K-12 students? It isn't clear to me from (admittedly skimming) the article, but it greatly changes how I feel about the situation. Yes, college students are adults and are entitled to all of the privacy protection of adults. I don't consider children to have the same right to privacy—although here too it depends on the age, high school is very different from elementary school.
- pixl97 4y ago
  They use the word 'district' which in general is pointing at K-12, I'm pretty sure I've only heard of 'school districts' and not college districts in standard communications.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    > especially among the K-12 student population that Gaggle serves. yep. I'm used to these exposés being for college programs but most of the drama has shifted to highschool and middle school these days. I don't know if that's progress or companies finding softer targets to sell their software to.

ergonaught 4y ago

One sizable group wants them to do X, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing Z. One sizable group wants them to do Z, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing X. And so on, and etc, because people are just emoting and parroting their script. What is the problem that one wants to solve? What are the guiding principles determining that it is a problem, that it needs a solution, and which are used to evaluate the potential solutions? That? That's too much work, and it's hard. So we fall into primate screeching because we haven't, actually, bothered to think.