[HN Gopher] Gaggle Drops LGBTQ Keywords from Student Surveillanc...
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       Gaggle Drops LGBTQ Keywords from Student Surveillance Tool
        
       Author : favourable
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2023-01-28 22:00 UTC (59 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.the74million.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.the74million.org)
        
       | LightHugger wrote:
       | >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.
        
       | louwrentius wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Spivak wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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?
        
       | ravi-delia wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Eumenes wrote:
       | I'm not following ... does gaggle only track kids who use the
       | email/chat apps administered through msft or google?
        
         | RockRobotRock wrote:
         | https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management
         | 
         | Yes, and LMS such as Canvas
        
       | fIREpOK wrote:
       | > 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 wrote:
         | 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)
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-28 23:00 UTC)