[HN Gopher] Schools Are Spying on Students - But Students Can Fi...
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Schools Are Spying on Students - But Students Can Fight Back
Author : sonograph
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-06-27 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| goatinaboat wrote:
| The one sort of surveillance schools need is live webcams so
| parents can monitor lesson content
| ddingus wrote:
| Looks like I will be a parent in this mess!
|
| My own kids are done, but I have my granddaughter to raise.
| (Rough, but she is great and will probably make me live longer,
| so no worries.)
|
| This is going to be a fight! That level of surveillance is
| unacceptable. I have no plan yet, but will in a year or so. Guess
| it is wake up call time.
|
| Seriously, I look back at my upbringing and what I was able to do
| for my kids, and shudder. I cannot imagine this ends well.
|
| Can you? Seriously. Anyone want to talk me down, or just talk?
| tremon wrote:
| I would consider this a teaching opportunity. Get her a Faraday
| case for the device. Explain to her that the case isn't to
| protect the device, but to protect her from the device. Try to
| make her control the device, rather than the other way around.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| The best thing you can do, unfortunately, is teach them
| yourself. It is hard, but the real root of this problem is that
| people expect schools, and therefore the state, to not only
| teach their children math and history but _raise_ them. As a
| result of this, people who actually want to raise their own
| kids get saddled with restrictive practices designed to raise
| your kids for you. The only way to opt out of it is to forego
| institutionalized education entirely, or at least if it hasn 't
| gone quite that far yet, it will.
|
| School the institution was not a very good place when I was
| there. It was not actually conducive to learning, peer
| influences were in general negative, authority figures were
| often abusive or at the very least ambivalent, and a sense of
| silent acquiescence to any authoritative demand was ingrained
| to the point that it takes young people years of their early
| adulthood to break this and begin building their own lives how
| they want them. Many of my peers went into massive debt on the
| presupposition that authority figures know what's best and that
| the institutional structure will look out for them, and I
| believe this is the direct result of the basically
| authoritarian environment they were raised in.
|
| And this, all I had to deal with were grainy cameras in the
| halls and police writing children tickets. From what I hear
| from people younger than me, it is much worse now.
| brighton36 wrote:
| Aren't the parents the ones to blame,here?
| darknavi wrote:
| Why do people (schools) care?
|
| What's the goal here?
|
| How does tracking everything a student does help them and how can
| they justify wasting time and money on this?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Schools are tasked with trying to solve all manner of social
| problems. Kids didn't show up? Blame the school for not
| dragging them in. Kids cheat? The administrator has to deal
| with it. Kids are fat? Must be that the school isn't managing
| their lunches. This is what they have come up with.
| prepend wrote:
| My schools tried to require school owned apple equipment that
| both restricted actions (couldn't message with parents or email)
| and monitored all activity, even when used from home.
|
| I forced my own equipment and they tried to install and reinstall
| various spyware throughout the year.
|
| It seems like rather than proposing a basic system of assignments
| and material and grades, they are trying to treat as a wholly
| owned ecosystem.
|
| This is also one of the things that frustrates me about "work
| computers" but at least they have a bit more claim since work
| computers are tools for work while school should be about
| learning.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Spying on kids outrageous. The sad state of things is that the
| most valuable tool kids could learn now is that it's not
| strangers but authorities who are predatory and self interested,
| and you need to learn how to manage authorities and rules, which
| means, how do you extract value from them without being pulled in
| and subordinated to or hustled by them. Respect does not mean
| obedience, it means maintaining clear boundaries for something
| and recognizing what's safe and what isn't. Respect for authority
| today means treating it like fire or heavy machinery.
|
| Raising kids being spied on is going to create a generation of
| spiritual fugitives and compromised, sadistic adult
| administrators. I could see home schooling being the next big
| tech platform trend, like a Montessori system with a way for
| parents to co-ordinate.
| [deleted]
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Surveillance in schools is a symptom, not a cause.
|
| To keep it focused on technology though, schools are super
| interesting - physical security is routinely violated. The iPhone
| really needs a dual-password mode, or some similar strategy, to
| protect its users.
| ElViajero wrote:
| > "If authority figures for youth say constant surveillance is
| OK, what happens when a romantic partner wants access to every
| message on their phone? Or an employer wants your social media
| password? Invasive monitoring isn't acceptable, no matter who
| tries to do it, and personal privacy matters."
|
| I think that it is even worse than that. In a decade or two, we
| are going to learn the many cases of sexual abuse that this
| surveillance facilitated. To give such an absolute power to
| adults over other people's children never ends well. And the kind
| of person that wants to spy on kids and teenagers 24/7 is the
| kind of person that should not be allowed to work with them.
| commoner wrote:
| Certainly already happening:
|
| > Over the next 15 days, the school district captured at least
| 210 webcam photos and 218 screenshots. They included photos
| inside his home of Robbins sleeping and of him partially
| undressed, as well as photos of his father. The district also
| snapped images of Robbins' instant messages and video chats
| with his friends, and sent them to its servers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
|
| > "Many of the images captured and intercepted may consist of
| images of minors and their parents or friends in compromising
| or embarrassing positions, including, but not limited to, in
| various stages of dress or undress," the lawsuit charges.
|
| https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/homepage/20100218_Lower...
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I feel like educators watched Ferris Bueller's day off, and
| decided they would crush that spirit with totalitarian tactics.
| What's the point of this level of control?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| If you're talking about teaching staff, they almost certainly
| have no part in purchasing or deploying these systems.
| Wistar wrote:
| I am married to a teacher who works in a district with
| absurd, heavy-handed IT policies imposed with no nuance or
| regard for the needs of the teachers. Simply researching
| curriculum on the school network has become very difficult in
| the past few years. Places where teachers often post
| collections of links to lesson topics, Pinterest and others,
| have been made unreachable.
| parsecs wrote:
| This sucks. My school district used a bunch of money to buy every
| student chromebooks. I remember just a few years ago, back when I
| was in middle school, I helped unbox all the chromebooks that
| were shipped to the school - about 2500 of them. Just for one
| middle school. Every student having access to these laptops made
| some thing a lot easier, like using Canvas to submit work done on
| Google Docs.
|
| However, this is in fact a real problem. Our district forced very
| obtrusive monitoring and blocking software, as well as literal
| bloat to be installed on the chromebooks - there's like 20
| browser extensions that cannot even be turned off, making the
| already low performing chromebooks so laggy that it's hard to
| use. Obvious "bad sites" like pirate bay, porn, and etc are
| understandably blocked, but they also block access to "social
| media" like reddit and discord.
|
| This doesn't sound that bad yet. The problem comes when students
| use their own devices instead of the school provided ones. Some
| sites and services are still blocked at the internet level, but
| can by bypassed easily. This means that, students with own
| laptops could communicate with each other using services that
| chromebook students cannot access. This means that students from
| families with lower income or with more siblings literally get
| blocked out of friend groups, with access only to heavily
| monitored google chat. During distance learning, this problem has
| only been made worse.
|
| Additionally, district chromebooks are absolutely no less
| distracting with the various censorship and monitoring and bloat
| - kids would still much rather browse the limited internet than
| pay much attention in class. I think there was some study that
| showed laptops drastically reduced student's academic performance
| on average. (Though I think access to computer is really powerful
| for learning how to access internet resources and developing
| actual knowledge.)
|
| TLDR my opinion and experience on technology + kids
| scrose wrote:
| What makes this even scarier is the amount of technological
| incompetence the people have who are monitoring these things.
|
| As far as I know, there's no legal equivalent to HIPAA(which
| itself only scratches the surface of things) for ensuring the
| data and logs of these invasive systems stays under tight
| supervision. Now add in the fact that the people monitoring these
| systems may have an infinite amount of their own selfish agendas
| in mind for what to do with the information they gather... well,
| this will end poorly.
| amelius wrote:
| Reads like this is about some highly guarded prison in a
| dystopian future.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I don't have a bucket large enough for me to throw up in.
| Disgusting.
|
| Ever increasing spyware, tracking this, recognition that, useless
| recommendations, ads everywhere I look.
|
| This stuff is eating me up.
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(page generated 2021-06-27 23:00 UTC)