4 ms·

California school district hires firm to monitor students' social media

44 points by codezero 13y ago

mehmehshoe 13y ago
"a larger portion" of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of four hours a day because "the content they read is so dark and heavy," Oh great, he is using Mechanical Turk to watch over students in LA.
beloch 13y ago
First off, no matter how you do it, it's pretty much impossible to do a quality job of what this firm is promising for $2.89 per student per year. However, there are host of other problems here. -A lot of bad jokes are going to create false positives, which will make teaching staff ignore the warnings they do receive. -The odds are rather high that a kid will post an orgy of pre-meditations and then do something horrible, but this contractor will either miss it or his warning will be ignored. -Kids don't like being spied on and will use social networks that aren't monitored. Some geeks might even try encryption or code-talk. What would I do? Educate children about the importance of getting their friends help when they need it. The people who know kids best are their friends. Compared to this contractor, they won't fall for as many bad jokes nor ignore as many subtle danger signs. Teach children to be good citizens who care about each other rather than carefully tended and monitored potential threats.
- mehmehshoe 13y ago
  I live in the area and I am friends with teachers within the school district. I see this article as a fluff/pr/sales bit of writing. The article states nothing about the tech or who supplies the names of the children to be watched. Most of the people on HN can guess the tech. Who is giving the ID of the targets is the interesting bit.
- epochwolf 13y ago
  Or you get a couple of creative and well connected kids to get a sizable number of other kids to spam keywords as a joke.
- superuser2 13y ago
  I believe they're monitoring publicly available profiles. So all you need is privacy settings.
- kdragon 13y ago
  I agree with your conclusions. This firm's service isn't being sold because it works, they are selling it because somebody is willing to buy it. Fear and paranoia are an invitation to the entrepreneur.
adamnemecek 13y ago
That's right, get them used to gov't surveillance while they are young. /s
- keithpeter 13y ago
  As a teacher (of older students than secondary) my first thought was this. And how they will develop work rounds and restricted language codes &c
bencollier49 13y ago
This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use networks with privacy), and catch the stupid ones who need education rather than discipline.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  >This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use networks with privacy) Well the obvious solution to that is to outlaw privacy.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
loser777 13y ago
$40,500 is a lot of money for a public school district. This kind of spending really feels like a game of whack-a-mole to me. There were two suicides in your school district? Ignore the underlying factors and and go straight to "social media," because that's what all the buzz is about today, right? It's a shame that given the serious shortage of public school funding in California that spending is done in such a myopic (and frankly, stupid) way. If you really want to build a better school, is adding excessive policing the first thing you should do?
- xenophanes 13y ago
  > Glendale Unified School District is comprised of 31 Schools and over 2,620 employees, serving 27,000 students in grades Kindergarten through 12th grade. You are very naive about budgets. You should change that if you want to freelance or do a startup. 40k is very little money for them.
  - hobs 13y ago
    If so, they should stop asking people to buy tissue paper for classrooms.
jka 13y ago
Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want to know what is being said about them or their field. Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not even a perfect coverage of public internet communications), or perfect accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets and boolean expressions), they can very aggressively sell the capability to people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we need to know about. I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places where that is relevant. I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well known to the public as Google web search. I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the meantime.
ZirconCode 13y ago
Nobody has mentioned yet. I took a look at the geolistening website, and the pictures alone pointed to an entirely different problem. I don't think the problem is lack of surveillance, I think it's teachers who are blind to what's happening at their schools, and parents who are doing a bad job at parenting (exporting it to education). If a parent listens to their child well, the child will tell them they are being bullied, or have problems. If the child is afraid to, or is ashamed, the parent should notice this. It's not normal behavior. The same goes for teachers. If a parent complains to the school that their child is being bullied, that shouldn't be ignored. If a teacher notices a child being bullied, that shouldn't be laughed off. Children try to seek help by nature. This seems to be an all-round lack of awareness and care for the child. I don't think technology can do much good with that attitude.
gweinberg 13y ago
Can somebody explain to me why what students do outside the school is any of the school's business? Oh well, I'm sure the students spend at least as much time cyberstalking the teachers as the schools do cyberstalking the students.
- jonlucc 13y ago
  This has concerned me since a student in my high school was punished for making some mean comments on another students wall on Facebook. Facebook was fairly new at the time. I presumed this would stop happening as people got more used to social services.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tzs 13y ago
  The article gave several reasons why the school is doing this. Whether or not any of these are any of the schools business depends on what you think the purpose of school is.
INTPenis 13y ago
Is this really new? I believe privacy issues have just gotten a spotlight now but I clearly remember a situation that happened involving my sister when she settled in the US more than 10 years ago. I was running a small web host at the time and we just happened to host her website, for free of course. She had just moved to the US, gotten her green card and started a job as a teacher. The school she was working for, or wanted to work for, had investigated her and found her personal website somehow. Even though she was posting under a pseudonym, and the website was hosted in Sweden. I don't remember if it was in Swedish though, maybe not. They objected to certain things on that website, not sure if it was the BDSM links or something about linking to Amazon. Either way, she didn't have a computer at the time so all she could do was ask me to take the website down for her. As I remember it, a lawfirm hade made this discovery on behalf of the school where she wanted to work.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Yet another example of how schools are more about incarceration and control than education. Right now with public schools in the US we're at the edge of spending less per student on teachers than on administrative staff and other expenses. So many forces keep telling us to increase spending on education. And we have. Whether at the K-12 level or at colleges and Universities total spending on education has more than doubled (per student, adjusted for inflation) since the 1970s, while education outcomes have generally been flat. What has increased at a pace with spending is non-teaching staff, which, not surprisingly, don't seem to accrue any benefit in learning to the students. The only way to solve the problem is to wrest control of the system away from the powerful interests that dominate it today. Unfortunately, a lot of legitimate educators are part of the machine and don't see any other way to make things better other than to continue to feed the machine with the hope that maybe a little bit trickles down to them and the kids.
benbristow 13y ago
" All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already made public by the students themselves. Therefore, no privacy is violated." Just use privacy settings on Twitter/Facebook then.

44 points by codezero 13y ago

"a larger portion" of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of four hours a day because "the content they read is so dark and heavy," Oh great, he is using Mechanical Turk to watch over students in LA.

beloch 13y ago

First off, no matter how you do it, it's pretty much impossible to do a quality job of what this firm is promising for $2.89 per student per year. However, there are host of other problems here. -A lot of bad jokes are going to create false positives, which will make teaching staff ignore the warnings they do receive. -The odds are rather high that a kid will post an orgy of pre-meditations and then do something horrible, but this contractor will either miss it or his warning will be ignored. -Kids don't like being spied on and will use social networks that aren't monitored. Some geeks might even try encryption or code-talk. What would I do? Educate children about the importance of getting their friends help when they need it. The people who know kids best are their friends. Compared to this contractor, they won't fall for as many bad jokes nor ignore as many subtle danger signs. Teach children to be good citizens who care about each other rather than carefully tended and monitored potential threats.

mehmehshoe 13y ago
I live in the area and I am friends with teachers within the school district. I see this article as a fluff/pr/sales bit of writing. The article states nothing about the tech or who supplies the names of the children to be watched. Most of the people on HN can guess the tech. Who is giving the ID of the targets is the interesting bit.
epochwolf 13y ago
Or you get a couple of creative and well connected kids to get a sizable number of other kids to spam keywords as a joke.
superuser2 13y ago
I believe they're monitoring publicly available profiles. So all you need is privacy settings.
kdragon 13y ago
I agree with your conclusions. This firm's service isn't being sold because it works, they are selling it because somebody is willing to buy it. Fear and paranoia are an invitation to the entrepreneur.

adamnemecek 13y ago

That's right, get them used to gov't surveillance while they are young. /s

keithpeter 13y ago
As a teacher (of older students than secondary) my first thought was this. And how they will develop work rounds and restricted language codes &c

bencollier49 13y ago

This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use networks with privacy), and catch the stupid ones who need education rather than discipline.

unimpressive 13y ago
>This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use networks with privacy) Well the obvious solution to that is to outlaw privacy.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

loser777 13y ago

$40,500 is a lot of money for a public school district. This kind of spending really feels like a game of whack-a-mole to me. There were two suicides in your school district? Ignore the underlying factors and and go straight to "social media," because that's what all the buzz is about today, right? It's a shame that given the serious shortage of public school funding in California that spending is done in such a myopic (and frankly, stupid) way. If you really want to build a better school, is adding excessive policing the first thing you should do?

xenophanes 13y ago
> Glendale Unified School District is comprised of 31 Schools and over 2,620 employees, serving 27,000 students in grades Kindergarten through 12th grade. You are very naive about budgets. You should change that if you want to freelance or do a startup. 40k is very little money for them.
- hobs 13y ago
  If so, they should stop asking people to buy tissue paper for classrooms.

jka 13y ago

Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want to know what is being said about them or their field. Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not even a perfect coverage of public internet communications), or perfect accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets and boolean expressions), they can very aggressively sell the capability to people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we need to know about. I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places where that is relevant. I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well known to the public as Google web search. I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the meantime.

ZirconCode 13y ago

Nobody has mentioned yet. I took a look at the geolistening website, and the pictures alone pointed to an entirely different problem. I don't think the problem is lack of surveillance, I think it's teachers who are blind to what's happening at their schools, and parents who are doing a bad job at parenting (exporting it to education). If a parent listens to their child well, the child will tell them they are being bullied, or have problems. If the child is afraid to, or is ashamed, the parent should notice this. It's not normal behavior. The same goes for teachers. If a parent complains to the school that their child is being bullied, that shouldn't be ignored. If a teacher notices a child being bullied, that shouldn't be laughed off. Children try to seek help by nature. This seems to be an all-round lack of awareness and care for the child. I don't think technology can do much good with that attitude.

gweinberg 13y ago

Can somebody explain to me why what students do outside the school is any of the school's business? Oh well, I'm sure the students spend at least as much time cyberstalking the teachers as the schools do cyberstalking the students.

jonlucc 13y ago
This has concerned me since a student in my high school was punished for making some mean comments on another students wall on Facebook. Facebook was fairly new at the time. I presumed this would stop happening as people got more used to social services.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tzs 13y ago
The article gave several reasons why the school is doing this. Whether or not any of these are any of the schools business depends on what you think the purpose of school is.

INTPenis 13y ago

Is this really new? I believe privacy issues have just gotten a spotlight now but I clearly remember a situation that happened involving my sister when she settled in the US more than 10 years ago. I was running a small web host at the time and we just happened to host her website, for free of course. She had just moved to the US, gotten her green card and started a job as a teacher. The school she was working for, or wanted to work for, had investigated her and found her personal website somehow. Even though she was posting under a pseudonym, and the website was hosted in Sweden. I don't remember if it was in Swedish though, maybe not. They objected to certain things on that website, not sure if it was the BDSM links or something about linking to Amazon. Either way, she didn't have a computer at the time so all she could do was ask me to take the website down for her. As I remember it, a lawfirm hade made this discovery on behalf of the school where she wanted to work.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Yet another example of how schools are more about incarceration and control than education. Right now with public schools in the US we're at the edge of spending less per student on teachers than on administrative staff and other expenses. So many forces keep telling us to increase spending on education. And we have. Whether at the K-12 level or at colleges and Universities total spending on education has more than doubled (per student, adjusted for inflation) since the 1970s, while education outcomes have generally been flat. What has increased at a pace with spending is non-teaching staff, which, not surprisingly, don't seem to accrue any benefit in learning to the students. The only way to solve the problem is to wrest control of the system away from the powerful interests that dominate it today. Unfortunately, a lot of legitimate educators are part of the machine and don't see any other way to make things better other than to continue to feed the machine with the hope that maybe a little bit trickles down to them and the kids.

benbristow 13y ago

" All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already made public by the students themselves. Therefore, no privacy is violated." Just use privacy settings on Twitter/Facebook then.