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> but I've also seen it save students' lives and stop mass violence events. The saving lives thing is always the excuse for total surveillance. Trading away yo

> but I've also seen it save students' lives and stop mass violence events. The saving lives thing is always the excuse for total surveillance. Trading away your freedom for security gets you neither.

mikkupikku 1y ago
It also relies on knowledge of a counterfactual situation. Was the guy arrested for a threat genuinely going to hurt people, or was it a dumb joke that was taken seriously by somebody snooping in a conversation they lacked the context to even understand?
- runjake 1y ago
  From experience, this is generally easy to figure out. The ratio between dumb joke threats vs actual threats is something like >99.9%.
  - mikkupikku 1y ago
    > The ratio between dumb joke threats vs actual threats is something like >99.9%. This makes the situation ripe for false positives. If 99.9% of threats are jokes and you correctly identify joke threats as jokes 99% of the time, that remaining 0.9% is several times larger than the real threats. And while the difference may seem obvious to you and I, being able to perceive the difference probably becomes harder across cultural divides (such as between teachers and a younger generation of students.) Furthermore, any bitter teacher with an axe to grind can leverage "zero tolerance" rules and strategic ignorance to deliberately construe a joke as a real threat to get rid of a kid they don't like (I've seen this sort of thing happen.) The more surveillance there is, the more opportunities there are to catch somebody making a edgy joke in what they thought was a private conversation.
runjake 1y ago
Touche. I get that and agree. It's certainly a polarizing conversation. I'm hoping the conversation and courts arrive at definitive guidance and regulations that preserves freedom, doesn't add to the surveillance state and provides some kind of answer to the half or more than half of the population that expects school districts to surveil everything kids do on their devices (self-harm, harm, bullying, etc). It's a really weird experience to hear the same powerful people argue both sides. How do you expect us to do one without the other? And again, it's... safe to assume there are a lot of bad actors in education where enforced safeguards are needed.
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  Just keep the spying to a minimum. Any spying on a kid or his family outside of school is off-limits. 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.
  - runjake 1y ago
    Already do, but that doesn’t help with the many more curious and nosy administrators out there, which is why you need regulations, enforcement, and auditing.
    - wakawaka28 1y ago
      Making the spying impossible is better than any regulations or auditing.
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        With a separate camera and microphone, I just unplug them when not in use. For the builtin camera, I put a sticker over it. I have zero faith in any software lockouts.
        astrobe_ 1y ago
        On a linux-like system, one could block access using file permissions, e.g chmod a-r /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c for a microphone. Probably less easy to do on Android, though.

mikkupikku 1y ago

It also relies on knowledge of a counterfactual situation. Was the guy arrested for a threat genuinely going to hurt people, or was it a dumb joke that was taken seriously by somebody snooping in a conversation they lacked the context to even understand?

runjake 1y ago
From experience, this is generally easy to figure out. The ratio between dumb joke threats vs actual threats is something like >99.9%.
- mikkupikku 1y ago
  > The ratio between dumb joke threats vs actual threats is something like >99.9%. This makes the situation ripe for false positives. If 99.9% of threats are jokes and you correctly identify joke threats as jokes 99% of the time, that remaining 0.9% is several times larger than the real threats. And while the difference may seem obvious to you and I, being able to perceive the difference probably becomes harder across cultural divides (such as between teachers and a younger generation of students.) Furthermore, any bitter teacher with an axe to grind can leverage "zero tolerance" rules and strategic ignorance to deliberately construe a joke as a real threat to get rid of a kid they don't like (I've seen this sort of thing happen.) The more surveillance there is, the more opportunities there are to catch somebody making a edgy joke in what they thought was a private conversation.

runjake 1y ago

Touche. I get that and agree. It's certainly a polarizing conversation. I'm hoping the conversation and courts arrive at definitive guidance and regulations that preserves freedom, doesn't add to the surveillance state and provides some kind of answer to the half or more than half of the population that expects school districts to surveil everything kids do on their devices (self-harm, harm, bullying, etc). It's a really weird experience to hear the same powerful people argue both sides. How do you expect us to do one without the other? And again, it's... safe to assume there are a lot of bad actors in education where enforced safeguards are needed.

wakawaka28 1y ago
Just keep the spying to a minimum. Any spying on a kid or his family outside of school is off-limits. 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.
- runjake 1y ago
  Already do, but that doesn’t help with the many more curious and nosy administrators out there, which is why you need regulations, enforcement, and auditing.
  - wakawaka28 1y ago
    Making the spying impossible is better than any regulations or auditing.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      With a separate camera and microphone, I just unplug them when not in use. For the builtin camera, I put a sticker over it. I have zero faith in any software lockouts.
      - astrobe_ 1y ago
        On a linux-like system, one could block access using file permissions, e.g chmod a-r /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c for a microphone. Probably less easy to do on Android, though.