[HN Gopher] Call to shut down Bristol schools' use of app to 'mo...
___________________________________________________________________
Call to shut down Bristol schools' use of app to 'monitor' pupils
and families
Author : pera
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-09-21 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| morkalork wrote:
| Not just the UK does this, in Canada there is something similar:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/kzdp5v/police-in-canada-are-...
|
| And it's not just police sharing data with schools, but also in
| the other direction where schools share data like unauthorized
| absences.
| merpnderp wrote:
| The title made it sound like the schools were installing malware
| on students' devices, but as far as I can tell this is just a
| central database bringing together data from different government
| agencies.
|
| I'm not sure I see the problem with schools getting an update
| that a kid was arrested by police or that their family is on food
| aid or something. Schools in my area need to know which kids are
| living in poverty because they send home backpacks of food with
| them over the summer.
| vharuck wrote:
| >Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in
| poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over
| the summer.
|
| What's wrong with just asking the parents?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Not all parents will respond, and of those that do, not all
| parents respond honestly. But the child still needs to be
| fed, whether the parent thinks they need to be fed or not.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It shouldn't be the responsibility of teachers or the
| school to provide food, but if there's a real need, then
| why don't they offer the food to those that want it and
| just cut out the secret database crap?
| notahacker wrote:
| You're going to need some sort of database to record who
| wants the food sending to them...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Why?
|
| Gather together a big pile of food and let the kids know
| where it is with instructions to only take what they need
| for the next couple of days or so. Why go to the bother
| of sending the food out, when the kids are already there.
| Also, the parents/carers may feel insulted if they are
| thought to be receiving "charity", so it'd be a better
| idea to allow the kids to obtain extra food without
| involving the rest of the family.
| notahacker wrote:
| The kids aren't already there _during the summer_. As the
| GP pointed out.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| In the US there is a summer lunch program at
| participating schools. And kid any day can come get a
| free lunch, they just pick it up. Makes sure that kids
| get food in the summer.
|
| So... why delivery and why a list?
| DRW_ wrote:
| Yes, all kids will be able to make it back to the school
| easily...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Neither are the teachers. This is why having the teachers
| act as a social security service is a poor idea.
| notahacker wrote:
| This may shock you, but the teachers aren't the ones
| delivering the food!
|
| Nevertheless, the organisation of services to provide
| free food to selected kids at home and at school requires
| a database to record _which kids_. Such a database is
| also accessible to schools for obvious reasons.
|
| If you have the very HN-y opinion that being on a
| database is so bad it would be better if the kids stayed
| hungry that's fine, but please at least make a token
| attempt to understand a system before dismissing it.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > If you have the very HN-y opinion that being on a
| database is so bad it would be better if the kids stayed
| hungry that's fine, but please at least make a token
| attempt to understand a system before dismissing it.
|
| Quite the opposite - my view is that if someone is
| hungry, then they should be provided food as a basic
| function of human society. To be honest, I've never heard
| of this food delivery system from UK schools and I
| thought that the issue was mainly handled (poorly in my
| view) by having Food Banks for starving families.
|
| Can you point me to some information on this UK scheme
| please?
| notahacker wrote:
| The food delivery system is, frankly a bit of a patchwork
| rather than a national scheme now: there was a national
| scheme introduced during the pandemic to supply vouchers
| to kids that would otherwise have received school meals
| during school closures, and packed lunches to self
| isolating kids, a lot of campaigns to extend that to
| regular school holidays spearheaded by the unlikely
| figure of a professional footballer, and now a patchwork
| of schemes run by many local authorities covering
| everything from community organised lunch clubs to
| vouchers to packed lunch deliveries
|
| If you want to argue it sounds like a mess and would be
| better as a broad social security scheme I'm not going to
| disagree (though limiting numbers on it does save
| governments money...), but either way, it's going to need
| names and addresses on a database to make it work.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Ah yes, Marcus Rashford.
|
| Not having kids myself, I didn't realise that teachers
| were so involved in providing food. I'd definitely go
| along with delegating food provision to a different group
| other than teachers (dinner ladies?). I suppose my
| concern is tying together multiple data sources when it
| should not be necessary to look at police records when
| deciding to give out food vouchers.
| didntcheck wrote:
| I wish people would stop calling any website/networked service
| an "app". That's just the interface
| lolinder wrote:
| > just a central database bringing together data from different
| government agencies
|
| I realize this is a US perspective, but this actually sets off
| _more_ alarm bells in my head than a school overreaching by
| installing spyware. The latter can be addressed by direct
| parental action pretty easily. Government agencies
| systematically sharing data is a lot harder to solve and if
| anything is more dangerous.
|
| Just because a family gets welfare aid from one agency doesn't
| automatically mean that they want their kid's school to know
| about it. Maybe they got enough and want their child to not
| have to feel different from the other kids by getting special
| treatment at school. Why not just let the family self-report
| their need to the school?
|
| More alarming is the idea of reporting interactions with
| police. A conviction is one thing, but an arrest could very
| easily be a mistake, and propagating that information
| _explicitly_ in the name of child protection is a recipe for
| turning that mistake into a tragedy when a school overreacts.
| pydry wrote:
| This is the kind of thing where it might be ask for a
| panopticon where the parents can see precisely what kind of
| queries are run on their data, by whom and why, with a time
| limited ability to keep query data secret for police
| investigations and such.
|
| Fighting against this type of data sharing on principle will
| probably fail because there are some legitimate use cases to
| Keep the Children Safe for this type of data.
|
| It'll be hard, however, to push back a request that all data
| access requests are _logged_ with _justifications_ because,
| after all it helps to Keep the Children Safe.
|
| You might also discover that the appetite for this data might
| wane entirely if they can't access it without being monitored
| and without having to justify themselves.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I'm curious how well a GDPR challenge would fare. There's
| specific exemptions around data gathering to detect fraud
| and to solve crimes, but this database has a lot more
| detail and the lack of consent from families is concerning.
| Silhouette wrote:
| One of the details mentioned in the article is that the
| ICO (the UK data protection regulator) has reportedly
| already given its blessing to what is going on here.
| That's interesting because it suggests that either the
| nature of the system and any potential risks it brings
| are being overstated by its critics or the public service
| that explicitly exists to regulate such systems isn't
| effectively limiting the power of the state where it
| should. Those are very different situations and I don't
| think there's enough objective information in the article
| to tell which is happening.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Article 6(1)(e) of the GDPR states that data processing
| is lawful if it is "necessary for the performance of a
| task carried out in the public interest or in the
| exercise of official authority vested in the controller."
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
|
| I assume they would argue public interest ... "protect
| the children" is the blanket public interest clause that
| allows all sorts of evil behavior.
| candiodari wrote:
| But social care agencies have a serious problem. They don't
| take good care of kids, which leads to them having a very bad
| reputation, which leads to child abuse (and many other
| crimes) not getting reported. Why? Simple: kids are treated
| far worse "in the system" than at home, even in abuse
| situations.
|
| But if CPS doesn't get kids reported, they don't get money.
|
| They don't want to fix this by taking better care of kids
| ("generational squeeze" on public finances, as the article
| puts it), so they must find other solutions. And the
| solutions they're going with are simple: get _everyone_ to
| report everything on kids, in a format that can be easily
| used in court.
|
| In 6 months, expect a message that a teacher got beaten up
| for, probably unknowingly, causing a kid to be forcibly
| placed into "care".
| oconnor663 wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to this, because my own politics are very
| libertarian. But recently I've gotten more sensitive to cases
| where we acknowledge that something is the government's job
| (e.g. protecting kids from violence), but then we insist that
| that job should be done _poorly_. I think this has ripple
| effects, not only in that the job doesn 't get done well, but
| in the culture of how the government works and who chooses to
| work in government. It seems like there should be a middle
| ground where we don't want the government to be responsible
| for too many things, but we do want it to be good at the
| things it's responsible for.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Sometimes we don't use every possible tool for every
| problem, particularly when the mass externalities may be
| worse than the individual outcome.
|
| An extreme example is nuclear weapons. You can win any
| single battle with nuclear weapons. But the world will end.
| Probably better to slog through trenches, and do the job
| "poorly".
|
| Labeling kids based of family situation will indelibly make
| their situations define them. Many kids living in
| dysfunction go to school as a refuge from their life.
| School administrators aren't social workers, and aren't in
| a position to provide psychological and social assistance
| to kids who need it. A lack of funding for those services
| doesn't mean you offload the work to functionaries at the
| local school. Teachers aren't trained in these areas either
| - their forte is education and no matter how much you liked
| your home room teacher, they weren't trained in social
| intervention. But there's another aspect, around that idea
| of escape - once you've labeled everyone according to their
| situation, when you walk in the room, you have to assume
| everyone knows. You can't let your life at home disappear
| any more. And not everyone who has access to the
| information will use it in a caring unbiased way. Many
| people will see a kid who has various labels of dysfunction
| associated with them as broken, needing special education,
| judge outbursts or misbehavior more harshly than an
| unlabeled kid.
|
| Finally, the entire point outlined in the article was to
| _use information about their situation to flag unknown
| problems_. Just because someone is on social welfare or a
| family member has a mental health issue, or even a parent
| is in prison, doesn't mean they're being sexually abused or
| whatever. However by labeling them administrators are
| _explicitly intended_ to use the label to assume a
| likelihood of previously unreported abuse.
|
| Many parents are accused falsely of abuse or neglect for
| normal childhood injuries. They go through the trials of
| the damned to get their kids back and fend off criminal
| charges, and criminal charges are indelible on your record
| and show up in background checks even if you're found
| innocent.
|
| So - yes, mass surveillance would likely catch more
| criminals. But it will also criminalize everyone, and
| punish many that are innocent. It's better to disarm and
| slog through the trenches - and maybe actually fund social
| workers rather than surveillance startups - than descend
| into this morass.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "but then we insist that that job should be done poorly."
|
| Where is that being insisted? Also, what is the bar for
| "poorly"? After all, were talking about the government,
| which does many things poorly despite massive budgets,
| extensive power, etc.
| [deleted]
| RHSeeger wrote:
| >But recently I've gotten more sensitive to cases where we
| acknowledge that something is the government's job (e.g.
| protecting kids from violence), but then we insist that
| that job should be done poorly.
|
| We don't insist they do the job poorly. Instead, we set
| things up so that they need to cover their own ... asses
| when they take action. Instead of making a rational
| decision on a per situation basis, we get things like "0
| tolerance" rules; so that the authority figure can say "I
| was just following the rules". Because if they make a
| judgement call, SOMEONE will flip out and they'll get
| fired. And that leads to all kinds of horrible outcomes
|
| - Child brings a plastic knife to school to cut their lunch
| with, they're suspended because it's a weapon
|
| - Child is attacked by a bully and is suspended, because
| they were involved in a fight
|
| Adding information gathering systems that will quickly wind
| up being abused, but have very little possibly positive
| value... doesn't help with what's currently wrong with the
| system.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Yep. I wrote a longer comment elsewhere in this thread so
| I won't repeat myself, but I think people attributing
| this to just surveillance obsession and nosiness are a
| little off the mark. If anything I would say the public
| have to share a fair bit of the blame here - there are
| constant demands that the public sector Do Something to
| Protect Our Children from abuse (independent of any
| statistics on frequency and whether the Something
| actually reduces it) which leads to an overzealous
| obsession with Safeguarding, and then teachers are
| trained to err on the side of oversuspicion, and know
| they may be raked over the coals if they fail to report
| when in doubt. So I'm afraid to say this is what a
| significant amount of the public demanded
| fatnoah wrote:
| Speaking of red flags:
|
| >Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign
| charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and
| carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they
| knew of it.
|
| The other red flag is exactly zero examples of how using this
| data allowed anyone to "safeguard" at-risk youth or to "act
| quickly" to intervene.
|
| It's profiling, plain and simple. Despite best intentions, it
| will definitely enable bias (unconscious or not) to be a
| factor in how children and their families/caregivers are
| treated.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I am not sure any of that is any of a schools business. Not
| even sure something like that would be legal over here.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| In the UK it's absolutely common for schools to be involved
| in family welfare simply because the other arms of the state
| have withered away to uselessness. In theory there's a
| concept of "Team Around The Child" where the various agencies
| - school, social services, social housing, sometimes even
| police - can come together to help the child through the
| rough circumstances they're in. In practice, the only one of
| those that isn't entirely dysfunctional is the school, and so
| you'll often find school headteachers or SENCOs basically
| acting as the sole champion of a kid from a troubled family.
| ChoHag wrote:
| [dead]
| hef19898 wrote:
| If that is what it is, more power to teacher caring that
| much abozt their students. Not sure if covert data
| collection at scale helps those teachers so.
| ballenf wrote:
| Maybe the real problem is that there exists a system design to
| allow querying a person's family connections to police
| interactions. This isn't even just convictions, but basically
| any accusations or investigations. The wording is kind of
| vague, but I think this framing is supported by the article.
|
| The existence of such a system just seems dystopian.
|
| Seems entirely reasonable that issues of domestic violence
| should be known to schools, but this goes way beyond that.
|
| It's only a matter of time before more public institutions
| manufacture reasons to use the same system. Surely the NIH
| should know about your police interactions before treating you.
| pera wrote:
| The council provides a data flow diagram showing the source
| of the data:
|
| https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/5972-insight-
| bris...
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| Bloody hell - until I looked at the digram, I did no
| realise - this is pure profiling. What has benefit data got
| to do with a child at risk. As per Housing - this is
| profile of people because they live on the 'wrong' estate.
|
| "Accessing Out of Work benefits" is saying the child may be
| at risk. "Teenage Parent" is used as an indicator.
| msla wrote:
| Health data, including mental health data, is fed into the
| system.
| robaato wrote:
| Scary. Just having an EHCP (Educational Health Care Plan)
| is an indicator...
| [deleted]
| didntcheck wrote:
| Yep. The fact that you can effectively be smeared by a state-
| managed record with often no right of appeal is disturbing.
| And this isn't the only scenario. Look up "non-crime hate
| incidents", which depend largely on a victim's claim that the
| event took place and that they believe it was "hateful", and
| I believe can show up on some DBS background checks. Why are
| the police disclosing these events that are by definition
| _non-crimes_?
|
| > For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society,
| saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will
| leave you alone [1]
|
| David Cameron was rightly criticized for those comments in
| 2015. Unfortunately there's been a bit of a culture shift
| since then, and it's now often those same critics supporting
| similar measures and implying that you must have something to
| hide if you fear them
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/13/counter-
| terr...
| candiodari wrote:
| [flagged]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in
| poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over
| the summer.
|
| This is the sort of thing that sounds good at first but ends up
| with these big brother databases.
|
| Really, why is it the responsibility of the _school_ to send
| home food with a child? Schools should teach. That 's it. If
| there is a need to send food to some family, there are agencies
| and charities that are specifically created and empowered to do
| that job.
|
| Using schools as conduits for all sorts of unrelated social
| services is why our schools are so fucked up. Instead of just
| being focused on teaching, they are now responsible for
| psychological services, food distribution to the needy,
| substance abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse intervention,
| mandatory reporting of any number of other concerns, all of
| which contributes to the need to monitor everything and
| centrally catalog and track as much information as you can
| about kids and their families.
|
| It was one thing when this kind of stuff might be a note in a
| file folder, but now it's online, probably poorly secured, and
| will never be deleted.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Man I totally agree with you, but you have to understand how
| bad meth has made things. The schools used to send home coats
| and clothing too, but the parents would sell them. In a just
| world the state would throw those piece of shit parents in
| rehab and have a wonderful place for the kids to stay until
| their parents either straightened up or lost custody. But it
| is what it is and we do what we can.
| ChoHag wrote:
| [dead]
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Nah the spyware is sold by a different company - for example,
| Impero.
| roody15 wrote:
| We use a product called Linewize in my district for around 2500
| students. To be honest its reporting is creepy to the degree it
| analyzes and tries to assign labels to student activity. Hate
| Speech, aggression, depression, suicide, criminality, gangs,
| sexual conduct, etc.
|
| I think we as a society need to decide are we just biological
| automatons that can be controlled via inputs and outputs? Or do
| we believe in some form of free will and with that some personal
| privacy.
| limbicsystem wrote:
| Can we also have a discussion about the 'normal' behaviour
| monitoring tools like Classcharts that are used by pretty much
| every school in the UK? These collect fine-grained data about
| behaviour throughout the day and link it both to the child but
| also the people that are near that child. It operates all across
| the child's school career. I've tried to opt my kids out of this
| but it's really hard. At best I think they have stopped logging
| their behaviour but they are still in the data as a 'network'
| influence. Classcharts used to boast about how their AI could do
| behavioural profiling but that looked too creepy so now they just
| talk about how teachers can use the data for seating planning.
| I'm pretty sure that I could use the data to profile a child
| pretty effectively even after they have left school. God only
| knows what happens to the data or how it is secured - the school
| literally don't care and think I'm crazy for even asking.
| circuit10 wrote:
| I guess whether it's fine grained throughout the day depends on
| the school, in my school they would only really give
| positive/negative points maybe once a week or less (if that's
| what you're talking about)
| didntcheck wrote:
| Yeah, the one good thought I did have when learning about
| this tool was "most teachers are not going to have the time
| to fiddle with this during teaching". But I'm sure there are
| several companies currently working on a way to do this
| scoring automatically via commodity webcams facing the class
| didntcheck wrote:
| Just had a watch of their demo video. One of the seating plan
| sliders allows you to cluster pupils by free school meals (i.e.
| socioeconomic class) or EAL status. Such wonderful technology!
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I'm so glad I don't have children in school in the UK. There
| seems to be so much going on that has nothing to do with
| education. I'm glad that when I was at school in the sixties
| and seventies in the UK none of that existed and teachers
| pretty much just taught.
|
| How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone
| protesting?
| lawlessone wrote:
| >How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone
| protesting?
|
| Apathy as others have mentioned. Apathy because people are
| tired. And maybe apathy because it's clearly being aimed at
| people for class and/or ethnicity. People tolerate a lot of
| bad if doesn't affect them in particular.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > How did this sort of thing creep into schools without
| anyone protesting?
|
| See the discussion in this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37594179
| Silhouette wrote:
| How did it creep in without protest?
|
| "Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign
| charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and
| carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they
| knew of it."
|
| I worry that our school system is now made up of teachers and
| support staff who are still absurdly undervalued and trying
| really hard to give our kids a good education but then a
| whole layer of management above them who have lost the plot.
| samwillis wrote:
| I have a friend who has been the safeguarding lead in a school,
| it's a tough and emotional job with enormous responsibility. He's
| found it incredibly fulfilling, but I can only imagine what he
| has had to deal with based on the few hits we have heard.
|
| My understanding is that the teachers that take on these roles
| are incredibly well trained, understand the responsibility, and
| know how to be both discreet and keep things privet. I believe a
| lot of the information available through this app was already
| being made available to the safeguarding leads in schools.
|
| Challenging the use of this app is good, that's the role of these
| origination, checks and balances and all that. We need to be sure
| it is a net benefit for all involved. There is no denying though
| that if it helps teachers in safeguarding children that is a good
| thing.
| swagempire wrote:
| What is a "safegaurding lead"? It sounds kind of creepy from
| your description.
| badcppdev wrote:
| It's the UK term for the person in any organisation that
| deals with vulnerable people (children, patients, disabled
| people, old people) that has the responsibility of taking any
| allegations, concerns, accusations and making sure they are
| dealt with properly. That means documenting, investigating,
| and escalating to the authorities.
| swagempire wrote:
| Shouldn't that be a lawyer normally? It sounds like they
| have a great potential to violate human rights.
| notahacker wrote:
| This may come as a surprise to you, but schools,
| community football clubs, nursing homes etc don't have
| full time lawyers in the UK. Someone has to decide when
| to call the police, when to call social services, when to
| [not] immediately alert parents, guardians of next or
| kin, when to seek further legal advice etc. And frankly
| the last person you'd want to be the main point of
| contact for vulnerable people dealing with sensitive
| issues is a lawyer whose job it is to minimise problems
| for the organisation (or maximise work for themselves...)
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I mean it just sounds like a formalized mandatory
| reporter to me.
|
| That's pretty much what they're there for in the US as
| well.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Somewhat similar to ombudsman?
| lozenge wrote:
| Maybe a guidance counselor or pastoral role? Who do the
| police call when they find a student misbehaving, who
| calls the parents when the kid is repeatedly absent, who
| talks to CPS if the kid is avoiding going home.
| swagempire wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| >There is no denying though that if it helps teachers in
| safeguarding children that is a good thing.
|
| The problem is the variability of quality of teachers. I seen
| and been involved, both as a parent and governor with
| Safeguarding leads. There has been wonderful, caring and
| talented teachers. I am not convinced the excellent teachers
| need more data - they know the kids and the families very well
| and can draw on years of experience and support.
|
| There has been also teachers, which have out-dated views and
| prejudices. This tool in the wrong hand makes matters far
| worse. This feels like a tool put together with people with
| outdated views. Like teenage parents are an indicator of a need
| for safe-guarding or being out of work is a correlation for
| safe-guiding. This clear prejudices being born-out.
| hollowdene wrote:
| I feel like the correct answer is proper oversight of how the
| system is used, not a blanket shutdown in case it's misused.
| Perhaps these charities who complaining should be involved in
| that?
|
| The goal of the service seems sensible, especially when you
| consider how often public services have made serious mistakes due
| to "information silos".
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Why would they keep it secret from the families and children
| unless it's doing something nefarious?
| jjgreen wrote:
| Quite, if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to hide
| ...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| If we've done nothing wrong, then why are they looking...
|
| By the way, can you send me your bank and credit card details
| so that I can just verify that you've done nothing wrong?
| jjgreen wrote:
| Sigh. I was agreeing with you, referring to Bristol Council
| who run the scheme, turning their own propaganda against
| them.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Sorry, I was expanding on the sentiment, not disagreeing
| with you.
| ben_w wrote:
| https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...
|
| They're not keeping it secret. It's the same sort of thing as
| all the EULAs/T&Cs we have to click agree to: much too boring
| to pay attention to, unless it's a headline.
|
| That said:
|
| > How long we will keep your personal information?
|
| > We will hold this information for as long as it is needed, or
| if we are required to do so by law. In practice this means that
| your personal information may be retained for the relevant
| period listed below:
|
| > * Integrated family Support (1772), 75 years
|
| - https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/5977-insight-
| bris...
|
| How on Earth is _75 years_ a legitimate duration for any of
| this information?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Just putting an information page up on the council's website
| isn't very useful unless the children and families know about
| the system and know to go looking for it. "The plans were on
| display..." etc.
|
| From TFA:
|
| > School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept
| the system secret from children and their families. One said:
| "They [parents and carers] wouldn't know about this ...
| parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just
| don't know of its existence."
| badcppdev wrote:
| You need to read up on your torts. Injury or harm done to a
| young person can result in a claim for compensation later in
| life. That's why paediatric insurance is so complicated.
| ben_w wrote:
| "We will keep a record of who you and your family hung out
| with and what your financial situation was when you were 15
| years old, until you are 90, just in case you (or
| presumably your great-grandchildren) want to sue the estate
| of someone that statistically will have pre-deceased you by
| 34 years"?
|
| It may be how UK tort law works, making it _legally_
| justifiable (or even legally mandatory), but the duration
| is still definitely stupid and wrong.
|
| Well, "stupid and wrong" unless this is one of those things
| where you need to be a lawyer in the first place to
| understand all the moving parts that make no sense
| otherwise; but that's how bad it looks from here.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Schools using the TFE app receive alerts about children's and
| family members' contact with police, antisocial behaviour and
| domestic violence incidents. The system also gives schools access
| to sensitive personal details about families' financial
| situations.
|
| Financial situations? That sounds like they're monitoring what's
| easy to monitor, even if defending against domestic violence was
| the original intention.
|
| That said, "we joined up thinking" is definitely a valid argument
| for much of what the UK is doing right now.
|
| For those not following UK news: a large number of schools had to
| be closed this month due to people finally started paying
| attention to the fact that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete
| lasted 30 years but had been installed 50 years ago.
|
| Monitoring _that_ would have been sensible... but they 'd have
| needed joined-up thinking to have noticed the problem had started
| happening in the 90s. (Thus making it one of the few cases where
| one can legitimately also spread blame to the previous Labour
| government even though the Conservatives have been in power for
| the last 13 years).
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > Bristol city council and Avon and Somerset police, who worked
| together on the system, insist it is in place to protect
| children, not criminalise them
|
| Of course! When has surveillance been used for anything, but
| protection?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This is a category error. The worst uses of surveillance in
| general do not apply to this case, unless someone tells us how
| it does.
| donatj wrote:
| When you give someone a power, always consider that it will
| basically always be used in the worst imaginable way.
| Regardless of any and all lip service to the contrary.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes, consider the power itself, not the category the power
| belongs to. If a school knows 2 extra things about you (on
| benefits; father in jail for child abuse), that's not the
| same as 24x7 video surveillance. Risk assess the reality,
| not the overarching category.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| Why dont we just take all the children? Let the state
| raise them. Father was in jail, he should never see his
| children ever again. Mother was drunk, take the kids and
| lets sterlize the parents just in case.
|
| I am making an extreme argument, there is obviously a
| line for CPS, but you have to remember that every system
| in the modern society is trying to be total. The police
| wants to stop crime, at all cost, if they could put is
| all in matrix like cells so we cant move they would. I
| will leave it to you to think what the ultimate goal of
| the education system is.
|
| The only thing that stops systems from becoming total is
| our votes and also the fact that they are somewhat
| adversarial to each other e.g. if one becomes more total
| it consumes from the other system's power and so each
| systems fight for its life and multi dimensional
| predator/pray equilibrium is formed.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The Police is not a paper clip machine. As soon as they
| consume half of GDP taking more will decrease their
| funding since they don't produce anything.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > you have to remember that every system in the modern
| society is trying to be total
|
| No, it's not. A school wanting to know a few things about
| a child is not "trying to be total". I get the extreme
| view; it can be warranted, but again, the worst case is
| not the average case, and we should just analyse the
| current case on its own merits.
| krisoft wrote:
| > you have to remember that every system in the modern
| society is trying to be total.
|
| What does "be total" means? I'm not familiar with the
| phrase.
|
| > The police wants to stop crime, at all cost
|
| Are you joking? Clearly not. There is so many things they
| could do if they "want to stop crime at all cost".
|
| > I will leave it to you to think what the ultimate goal
| of the education system is.
|
| I don't know what you are insinuating. Could you spell it
| out please?
| adolph wrote:
| Yes: _' I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other
| Misunderstandings of Privacy_ by Daniel J. Solove
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=99856
| 5
|
| _Franz Kafka's The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy
| with inscrutable purposes that uses people's information
| to make important decisions about them, yet denies the
| people the ability to participate in how their
| information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka
| metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused
| by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition
| or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information
| processing--the storage, use, or analysis of data--rather
| than information collection. They affect the power
| relationships between people and the institutions of the
| modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by
| creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but
| they also affect social structure by altering the kind of
| relationships people have with the institutions that make
| important decisions about their lives._
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Sorry, I don't know how these relate to what I said.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Have you thought about the number of powers both large and
| small that are delegated so that society can operate.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| If society is operating, it's not operating well.
| freeopinion wrote:
| For example, if you allow ordinary people to operate heavy
| automobiles, somebody is going to use one to intentionally
| kill somebody else. Did you think about that before you
| unleashed millions of these killing machines?
|
| I'm not excited about developments in Bristol, but
| introducing extreme paranoia isn't helpful. Just a low
| level of healthy paranoia is good enough.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The climate change crowd probably shouldn't be so glib
| about cars being murder machines. Supposedly, they are
| murdering an entire planet.
|
| Also, at least where I am, the drunk driving rates are
| high enough, that murder-by-car isn't exactly uncommon.
|
| I don't think your counter-argument hits as hard as you
| think it does.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Predatory teachers may use this to get some background
| details on their targets or to identify potential targets for
| grooming. Luckily those kinds of teachers are rare, but not
| unknown.
|
| Also, some police are known to be racist, so if a certain
| officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or
| ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be
| entered into the database and this could then affect the
| families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed,
| the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams
| if they've been prejudiced by the data.
| notahacker wrote:
| If the _safeguarding lead_ at a school is a predatory
| teacher looking for grooming targets, the existence of
| databases is the least of kids ' problems. Particularly if
| the database is mainly flagging up kids that might already
| be at risk of abuse.
|
| Predatory individuals who are _not_ safeguarding leads
| benefit much more from people campaigning to silo any
| records that suggest /confirm they might be a threat.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Unfortunately, child predators are likely to get
| themselves into as strong a position of trust as possible
| - coaches, church leaders etc, so I would expect them to
| attempt to become a safeguarding lead. They could then
| also use the data to explain why they were taking certain
| kids into one-on-one sessions.
| notahacker wrote:
| I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never
| attended a school but is tuned to contradict me
| regardless here!
|
| Senior leaders at schools don't need "data" to justify
| talking one on one to students or to figure out which
| students seem vulnerable.
|
| On the other hand, data _is_ useful for people with
| actual welfare concerns about a child in establishing if
| there might be some underlying reason behind the child 's
| weird behaviour or expressed fear of going home or
| visible bruising that's "just an accident". Ensuring
| nobody can share threats data is a _massive net boon_ to
| people that harm kids.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has
| never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me
| regardless here!
|
| I very much enjoyed my time at an ordinary human child
| school and attended the mandatory educational lessons
| very promptly.
|
| There's a balance between using data to identify problems
| and collecting data which is open to abuse. What concerns
| me is the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by
| teachers who are typically not the most privacy focussed
| people. The predatory teacher example is an outlier, but
| it demonstrates how there can be unintended consequences.
| What's more likely is that there will be unconscious bias
| by the teachers against the disadvantaged children from
| poorer backgrounds.
|
| To my mind, teachers should only function as a backup
| social service for those kids that slip through the net
| (admittedly, not a good net) and should be focussed
| primarily on education. What set my alarm bells ringing
| is the lack of openness about the database and whether
| families can correct false records (assuming they even
| know that the data exists).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers
|
| Where did you get this impression?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| If the children and their families are unaware of the
| database, then there's a lack of accountability. I also
| saw no mention of controls in the article, though if
| there's controls that the families know nothing about,
| then they would be somewhat moot.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| There's no evidence that any teachers can see it. It says
| safeguarding leads, which don't even have to be teachers.
| What's left of what you're saying if we remove your
| assumptions?
| notahacker wrote:
| But the "apparent indiscriminate use" is all in your head
| (I'm glad you have an ordinary human head ;), and if
| teachers were contacting the safeguarding lead to try to
| establish who has criminal parents that wouldn't exactly
| be an _unconscious_ bias anyway! There 's plenty of
| opportunity for actual unconscious bias every time they
| look at a child or the child opens their mouth...
|
| The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about
| it found out because it's described in detail on the
| local authority website, the fact authorities keep
| records of stuff like absence from school and social
| worker contacts is universally known (most of the recent
| child victim scandals in the UK have been that various
| people noted of various possible signs of problems at
| various times but nobody had enough of a joined up view
| to actually act!) and the only bit teachers are going out
| of their way to not disclose is "I looked up Jonny's info
| because I'm not convinced that bruising is
| accidental".... for obvious reasons
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining
| about it found out because it's described in detail on
| the local authority website
|
| Well for at least some values of "secret":
|
| > School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they
| kept the system secret from children and their families.
| One said: "They [parents and carers] wouldn't know about
| this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all
| ... They just don't know of its existence."
|
| The article is short on details about how access is
| controlled to the database, so I am assuming (possibly
| making an ass out of u and ming) that it's poorly
| controlled. The lack of notification to the families is
| of concern although there's certainly scenarios where you
| specifically don't want them to be notified.
|
| My biggest worry is further widening the gap between the
| rich and the poor and between different ethnic groups.
| Allowing teachers to have access to police data on the
| families could be very problematic.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Also, some police are known to be racist
|
| Worse yet, most police are at least classist. Poor
| neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier
| neighborhoods.
|
| What happens when there's already heavy policing of poorer
| neighborhoods, and police are trained to "get the bad ones
| off the streets"? They look for any excuse to arrest and
| prosecute people in those neighborhoods. Once you have a
| felony conviction on your record, you're basically
| unemployable for 10 years (in the US at least). Thus
| continuing the cycle of poverty. And of course, minorities
| tend to be disproportionately poor.
|
| This makes that cycle worse. Anyone in the proximity of
| such a felon due to this data collection and aggregation
| now becomes a target by the police, raising their chances
| of getting caught up in the legal system and experiencing
| life-long consequences because of it.
| adolph wrote:
| > Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than
| wealthier neighborhoods.
|
| I see this sentiment often. If this were true it would
| represent a criminal opportunity to victimize "wealthier
| neighborhoods." As far as I can tell: that does not seem
| to be the case very often; and victimization rates are
| higher in "poor neighborhoods."
|
| I can see the logic of an argument that excessive legal
| criminalization induces cycles of harmful involvement in
| law enforcement and legal systems. However, using the
| language "policed far more heavily" as opposed to
| "criminalized far more heavily" places the blame on a
| convenient-to-scapegoat blue-collar occupation rather
| than directly upon the powerful people who compose the
| ever-expanding encyclopedia of laws and regulations.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Police already have discretion to enforce the law on
| whomever, and however they wish. It is inappropriate to
| try and shift blame entirely to lawmakers, when
| (obviously) the police have culpability here because of
| the choices they make regarding the enforcement of those
| laws. That's why the sentiment is so common. Obviously.
| Come on.
| adolph wrote:
| I still don't get it--not being obtuse, it isn't obvious
| to me. Is the claim that differences in policing are due
| to discretion in law enforcement and not because
| victimization rates are different in neighborhoods of
| different socio-economic statuses?
|
| Discretion in enforcement is either lawful or not. If
| discretion is the key problem and lawmakers do not
| address it, then yes, the responsibility is on lawmakers
| and ultimately on voters.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Discretion is not the key problem. Discretion is a
| necessary part of the job.
|
| Let me address victimization rates - because yes, they
| are higher in poorer communities. That does not justify
| in any way the behavior of police in those communities,
| which is to randomly pull over/stop and search/etc.
| people on the street who "look" like bad guys. If
| somebody kills someone, sure, arrest them and put them in
| prison. Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent
| offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support,
| etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it.
|
| https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/incarceratio
| n-a...
|
| The culture of policing is the key problem, which is
| created by a confluence of training, recruiting
| practices, general societal attitudes, and the political
| leadership of elected officials. It's not one problem, as
| you can see - it's many contributing factors.
|
| A local town near me was praised some years back for
| drastically reducing violence by shifting towards
| community-based outreach policing. The local news
| actually called out Chicago for not following its
| example, you should definitely read about it:
|
| https://www.aurora-il.org/1637/Community-Oriented-
| Policing-C...
|
| Critics of community oriented policing typically view it
| as "being soft on crime" instead of a systems problem.
| The "put bad guys in prison" model has the effect of
| continuing the cycle of poverty, and measures such as
| mostly doing away with pre-trial detention (i.e. bond)
| for non-violent offenders are intended as a systemic fix
| for the poverty cycle.
| ballenf wrote:
| > worst uses of surveillance in general do not apply to this
| case
|
| So only the "pretty bad" uses of surveillance apply and
| that's ok? Not sure I understand your point.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If a school knows that a child must be kept away from their
| abusive mother, for example, that is what is being lumped
| in with "surveillance" here. I'm saying the worst cases of
| surveillance are not appropriate to judge what the school
| is doing. We should judge what the school is doing on its
| own merits/demerits.
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| Lots of people here not really understanding how this works in
| the UK.
|
| A few times there's been a big media stories in the UK about a
| child who got badly abused or killed in domestic situations and
| then afterwards it turns out that various people (social
| services, teachers, charities etc) had concerns about the child's
| safety but concerns weren't written down or joined together and
| so the child could have been saved/rescued but wasn't.
|
| So now in the UK we have a system of 'safeguarding referrals'
| where if someone has concerns they must make a safeguarding
| referral to social services but social services are terribly
| underfunded so the safeguarding referrals tend to pile up or just
| get filed unless they are really urgent. So now we have the
| problem of someone somewhere being responsible for wading through
| all the information and then identifying when the various reports
| from various places add up to a serious situation.
|
| Hence you get an app like this where info from various agencies
| can be gathered in one place.
| https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...
|
| If you're going to hold government services such as social
| services or teachers responsible for childrens safety then this
| sort of thing is needed. And if you think thats not the job of
| the state then fair enough thats your opinion but in the UK the
| status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after
| vulnerable children/people.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _If you 're going to hold government services such as social
| services or teachers responsible for childrens safety then this
| sort of thing is needed. And if you think thats not the job of
| the state then fair enough thats your opinion but in the UK the
| status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after
| vulnerable children/people._
|
| This is the heart of the problem. When you start trying to turn
| people like teachers and doctors into something other than
| teachers and doctors you risk breaking the essential trust
| between parents and the professionals who have a role in their
| children's lives. That is a dangerous path to follow. Obviously
| no-one wants to see any child suffering abuse or neglect and
| obviously as a last resort the authorities might have to
| intervene to protect a vulnerable child from harm. But there
| are other dangers with measures like this that are easily
| overlooked in our culture today and I'm not sure that's
| healthy.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Unfortunately 13 years of Conservative Party government means
| that there's no-one left, apart from the teachers, to do the
| "something other". Phone up your local UK health trust and
| ask what the waiting time is for a CAMHS referral (Child &
| Adolescent Mental Health Service). Here's the first one I
| googled: 30 months.
| https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/camhs/oxon/ndc/assessment/
| Silhouette wrote:
| It's easy to blame the incumbent government - and maybe in
| that respect there is some justification for doing so - but
| I doubt the deeper issues here are really about party
| politics. The previous Labour era was also increasingly
| authoritarian and Starmer, despite his history as a defence
| lawyer with an interest in human rights cases, has so far
| shown little willingness to roll back these kinds of
| measures. I find that remarkable given the number of large
| and potentially very harmful data breaches there have been
| this year alone from police services and other government
| offices including those with responsibilities for sensitive
| child protection matters but perhaps it is a sign of the
| times.
|
| I do worry that our society has just resigned itself to the
| fact that these intrusions will happen and every now and
| then someone will suffer very badly as a result but "it
| would never happen to me". I find that ironic when the
| original subject was child protection where the main
| concern is situations that are relatively rare but can be
| very harmful for the child when they do happen.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Certainly experience here in Oxfordshire (my wife has
| been safeguarding lead at her last two schools) is that
| the dramatic increase in CAMHS and EHCP referral times is
| entirely during the Conservatives' spell in power - and
| the consequent underfunding of local government. It could
| just be a local issue, and Oxfordshire have certainly
| been doing badly, but reporting suggests it's widespread.
| But like you I have no confidence that Starmer will make
| things better.
| Silhouette wrote:
| I don't doubt you about the situation in Oxfordshire. I
| suppose I'm suggesting that these measures are symptoms
| of a wider malaise that has developed in our society over
| a longer period, where "personal responsibility" are
| somehow dirty words and everything has to be someone
| else's fault now.
|
| That leads to unrealistic expectations that the
| government will somehow solve all problems. That in turn
| creates a political culture dominated by fear and CYA
| with an unhealthy side order of paranoia and everything
| conceivable being monitored/measured.
|
| I don't know for sure what caused this. I suspect a
| product of several factors including 24/7 news, near-
| universal access to online systems and particularly
| social media, and a few high profile events like 9/11
| where governments responded very badly and effectively
| encouraged a culture of fear. It's definitely something
| about our culture that has changed very clearly within my
| adult lifetime though. The idea of having principles and
| understanding why they matter feels very old-fashioned
| today. And again I don't think that's healthy for our
| society at all.
| [deleted]
| rob137 wrote:
| I'll just throw in that I volunteer for an organisation that
| often deals with children, and in many ways safeguarding has
| been a disaster. I can totally see how good intentions
| following the 'Baby P'* case led to laws like this. But the
| reaction from many organisations has been to completely
| reorient themselves, and at all costs.
|
| This is quite natural given that ultimately the law poses the
| greatest threat to the leaders of charities, schools etc. You
| really don't want a high profile failure on your watch.
|
| When I was trained to lead shifts of volunteers, it stood out
| to me that the _only_ instruction I received was in
| safeguarding...
|
| My first thought was that something simply isn't quite right,
| since safeguarding is far newer than the organisation itself.
|
| But actually I think this is just the way of things. If you
| have enormous punishments, then you will have commensurate
| reactions from management.
|
| We've lost a large number of volunteers because we can no
| longer guarantee anonymity to young people. Initially we were
| reassured that we would only be expected to report things when
| identifying information was willingly given to us. This has
| since been revised to instructions that we are to actively seek
| such information.
|
| The law itself was brought in following high profile instances
| of horrific abuse that went overlooked by social services.
| However, the scope of the law is surprisingly wide.
|
| For instance, this would all apply to a 17-year-old who
| mentions that they were being bullied by peers.
|
| I myself do feel conflicted - abuse is terrible, and it's worth
| tolerating other kinds of indirect harm to prevent. But it's
| still shocking to me that the second order consequences don't
| appear to get discussed at all in the public sphere. I do worry
| that this has been snuck in as a "Save The Puppies Act" without
| proper deliberation.
|
| I'm unsure if there are other countries who have pretty much
| identical laws, or if it is just the UK?
|
| * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Connelly
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| Yes I've seen the same thing. As you say, lots of orgs have
| had to reorient themselves around the safeguarding process
| rob137 wrote:
| Another example that just sprang to mind. A headteacher I
| know reported safeguarding concerns when he was made aware
| that a 7 year old was walking to primary school alone. I
| suppose partly to do with leaving a paper trail in case the
| worst should happen - but the system then does kick in all
| the same. It's the same law that was originally designed to
| deal with far more serious incidents. (You could argue that
| this case wouldn't even qualify in many peoples' minds, but
| it's also not obvious to me that the headteacher was being
| irrational, given the law.)
| joncrocks wrote:
| I don't think it's just the UK.
|
| I think the issue is that it's very hard to have open
| discussions about accepting that certain events are
| unavoidable and preferable to the second order impacts of
| trying to 'solve the problem'.
|
| It's hard to talk about at least in part that 'the problem'
| in these situations tends to be a terrible event that can be
| avoided, but only avoided by doing lots of lots of 'ever so
| slightly terrible' things. And so it takes a toll on the soul
| to look at the balance and say that we should live with 'the
| problem'.
| rob137 wrote:
| Yes, this captures my feeling too. It feels like an evil
| problem. It's not just misaligned incentives, though they
| do play a role.
|
| I would love to find a name for this type of dynamic. I
| don't have words for the issue, and feel like I could
| communicate it more easily to others if I did.
| didntcheck wrote:
| To combine some metaphors - is it basically shooting the
| messenger who tells you that the cure is worse than the
| disease?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| So many tragedies happen daily because of human imperfections
| and limitations. If we develop and put a monitoring collar on
| the neck of every human being from the day they wre born, we
| could save so many of them.
|
| How far are you willing to go?
| [deleted]
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| I dont think anyones advocating going that far
|
| edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between
| the two ludicrous extremes of 'everyone just look out for
| themselves' and 'collars that monitor every moment of their
| lives' based on general consensus arrived at via public
| discussion and democracy.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I dont think anyones advocating going that far
|
| Not yet.
|
| > edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere
| between the two ludicrous extremes
|
| That sensible conclusion is "you can't save everyone". If
| you try, you inevitably become the tyrant we must be saved
| from.
|
| To save everyone, you require omniscience and omnipotence.
| You must know everything about your subjects and have the
| power to act on that knowledge. There's not a single human
| on this Earth I would trust with that power.
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| _That sensible conclusion is "you can't save everyone"_
|
| I never said you could.
|
| It must be hard for you to get around with all these
| slippery slopes you keep seeing everywhere
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Tony Blair proposed psychological analysis of kindergarten
| children to predict which ones would become criminals.
| China has a social score system.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I'm still waiting for him to be tried as a war criminal
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| Here's the description of the system from
| https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...
|
| Think Family Database (TFD)
|
| ---------------------------
|
| The Think Family Database (TFD) supports and connects
| safeguarding professionals from Bristol City Council and other
| public sector organisations.
|
| The data collected by Insight Bristol is securely held in the
| TFD, and includes information from approximately 50,000
| families across Bristol.
|
| The TFD pulls together data from several public sector sources
| including:
|
| -Bristol City Council (Children Social care, Early Help,
| Education)
|
| -Avon and Somerset Police
|
| -Department for Education
|
| -Department for Work and Pensions
|
| -South West Commissioning Support Unit (SWCSU)
|
| The data from these organisations displays vulnerabilities or
| needs. It gives practitioners working with families an
| understanding of:
|
| -the family's immediate need
|
| -which services the need comes from
|
| The practitioner can contact the relevant service. This helps
| the practitioner better support the family because:
|
| -the practitioner can discuss the family's immediate issues
| with the agencies involved
|
| -the family does not have to repeat the same story
|
| This embedded approach helps practitioners coordinate support
| for families who are most in need. Sometimes those families are
| obvious but often they are hidden. The TFD highlights the
| hidden issues.
|
| Using targeted analytics, the system also helps identify
| children at risk of:
|
| -sexual exploitation
|
| -criminal exploitation
|
| -not being in education, employment, or training
|
| This information supplements the wider council Think Family
| approach.
|
| These models do not replace professional judgement or decision-
| making. They guide and supplement the work of professionals and
| provide information about children at risk that professionals
| may not easily see. This early identification means that
| support and interventions can be put in place to stop problems
| turning into crises.
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| And here's a uk government report about the data sharing
| mechanisms for the app https://assets.publishing.service.gov.
| uk/government/uploads/...
| stainablesteel wrote:
| the article constantly mentions racism and i don't understand how
| racism fits into this picture
|
| i think when they write things like that it means "we don't mean
| to expose the racist behavior of certain black students when we
| spy on them through apps we force them to install", which is
| pretty crooked all around
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I noticed that too and was wondering about it, then I saw this
| quote:
|
| _Critics say the reality is that this risks children from
| minority ethnic or poorer backgrounds being profiled as being
| involved in gangs or county lines operations._
|
| So the fear seems to stem from this.
| didntcheck wrote:
| It's a Guardian article. You get used to it...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > the article constantly mentions racism and i don't understand
| how racism fits into this picture
|
| Some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer
| gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group,
| then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into
| the database and this could then affect the families' chances
| of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may
| decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been
| prejudiced by the data.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| "The force said "robust privacy and sharing agreements" had been
| approved by the Information Commissioner's Office and development
| of the system done in collaboration with the Centre for Data
| Ethics and Innovation."
|
| ...but not the parents.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Are these government institutions in Bristol? If so do they
| have public blogs or other citizen friendly mechanics for
| sharing important decisions?
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| Yep here's a UK gov report about the data sharing that makes
| the app possible
|
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/.
| ..
| RHSeeger wrote:
| There is plenty of information about a child that, if made
| known to the parents, would wreak havoc on the child's life.
| For example, through metadata alone, it could be possible to
| identify that a child has LGBTQA interests/associations/etc.
| There are plenty of children where the parents knowing this
| could lead to them being punished harshly, or even on the
| streets. I don't think automatically sharing everything with
| parents is the expectation/panacea you seem to imply it would
| be.
|
| Admittedly, I don't think the schools should have this
| information either.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| Would this app have been any use in Rotherham? Or were
| politically insulated foreign invaders just always going to be
| allowed to rape native children with the full knowledge of local
| government?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Sounds a lot like the systems some police departments are using
| to profile people who might commit crimes before they actually
| happen. Voyager, or something like that?
| swayvil wrote:
| We call it "right to privacy". But what if we call it "right to
| hide" or "right to lie" or "right to censor"? That certainly puts
| a different light on it.
|
| Universal 24-7 communication about absolutely everything would be
| a very very good thing. Take our whole society up a level.
|
| Except that we have these big predators lurking about.
|
| So the problem isn't the privacy, it's the predators. Right?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I think you've got it back-to-front.
|
| Personal identifying information does not belong to any company
| that gathers or purchases it unless they have specific
| permission (i.e. not some dark pattern "click here to disable
| the non-collection of your data") from the person and it is
| reasonable for them to have that data for their stated purpose.
| (Somewhat paraphrased from GDPR). The company and or government
| department need to have a strong reason to be manipulating the
| family's data and the family should have the right to see the
| data that is being held on them and also correct or delete it
| if it is incorrect.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| Is this parody? Is the right to lie really all that scary? Do
| you want to live in a world where you can hide nothing?
| imnotlost wrote:
| The Brits have gone all in on the surveillance society with their
| CCTV cameras all over the place and now the Online Safety Bill.
| Still early days, I'm sure it'll be expanded at every
| opportunity. Maybe 1984 is the blueprint.
|
| In the US the fundamental Christians are grabbing power and
| they're taking flamethrowers to books and talking about tracking
| women who may go across state-lines to get an abortion. Self-
| censorship for fear of being 'canceled' is putting a damper on
| the spirit of freedom. It's perhaps more along the lines of
| Fahrenheit 451.
|
| May you live in interesting times.
| didntcheck wrote:
| While I agree that our politicians are obsessed with sticking
| their nose in people's private business (and the shadow cabinet
| often merely object that the proposals don't go far enough!),
| but I would say this is mostly down to a different issue - an
| overzealous obsession with "safeguarding" and the belief that
| it must be possible to preemptively block all societal harms,
| and that those objecting to the cost of the attempts must just
| be running apologetics.
|
| I have friends and family who work in education and other
| social care roles, so hear about the various training and
| policy they're given, and it almost feels like the public
| sector is putting parents on perpetual trial. And there's the
| underlying assumption of "if in doubt, raise it", with the
| false belief that a false report is harmless and will surely
| come out in the wash with no harm from the process.
|
| Though it's important to remember this isn't down to the staff
| all being little Umbridges _wanting_ to cause stress; as usual
| it 's down to incentives. They are explicitly told they could
| be at fault for failing to report a Potential Safeguarding
| Issue, so it's the safer option in doubt. And at an
| organisational level, any instance where a child does come to
| harm leads to potentially nationwide accusations of negligence
| (sometimes fair) and demands to Do Something, no matter what
| that something is, what its collateral costs are, and if it
| even works in the first place.
|
| And of course it would be unfair not to mention that the
| teachers themselves are often very much victims of similar
| overscrutiny, and are quite used to self-policing their
| behavior, with fear of both policy violations _and_ parents '
| ire. Again, I'm largely criticizing the policy not the people.
| The common sense and discretion of workers on the ground is
| often a good defense against stupid policy, but not when
| there's a credible fear of being disciplined for that
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's not just the British.
|
| For decades in the US, school administrators have been obsessed
| with monitoring student's online activity and email. There is a
| lucrative industry providing what amounts to glue and regexs
| for detecting and reporting suicidal language, threats of
| violence, and so on (you can be sure there's detection of LGBTQ
| language for all the various religious schools.)
|
| There is a subreddit for K-12 IT administrators and the stuff
| people would post there about monitoring students was pretty
| shocking (also, the levels of incompetence are also pretty
| shocking. Most of the crowd are barely competent at IT basics.
| People who are in charge of IT at multiple campuses.)
|
| Tell your kids that any email account associated with the
| school, and anything they even type into a school device
| (phone, tablet, laptop, computer) is monitored, and even the
| most innocent keyword could flag their email and put it front
| of admins. If they want to talk to a trusted friend about
| anything regarding the administrator or teachers, or something
| regarding mental health, sexuality, bullying, violence, etc -
| they need to do it on devices not associated with the school,
| with no school management software installed, on non-school
| accounts.
|
| In fact, they should probably never use their school accounts
| or devices for anything except strictly school related
| communication and work.
|
| It's amazing how completely ignorant these admins are that,
| say, hauling a suicidal student into a meeting with
| administrators is just about the last fucking thing that kid
| needs, and yet that's exactly what was described in some posts
| and discussions. The only thing they care about is snooping in
| student's activity and covering the school's ass.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Sadly a lot of kids only have one portal to the internet and
| that's through a school device.
|
| Otherwise the advice should be, as you said, to never use a
| school device for anything not explicitly required by the
| school. But when there's no other route, surveilled access is
| better than none, I guess?
|
| It's a tough quandary though - schools can be held liable, at
| least socially so if not legally, if kids use school provided
| devices for all the things kids use devices for that they
| shouldn't. Meeting sexual predators, bullying, etc. Many
| parents are technically incapable of monitoring their online
| activity, others too busy. Schools are being put in a weird
| spot of being access providers to an adult world online, not
| just educators.
|
| I'll wager a lot of school surveillance started with parents
| demanding it.
|
| It's a tough subject, I don't have the answer. My intuition
| tells me schools shouldn't be involved in access OR
| monitoring, but I also understand the "digital divide" isn't
| just a media term. A lot of pretty smart kids live in a
| pretty neglected context, and without access to sources of
| fact like Wikipedia or sources of dubious plagiarism like
| ChatGPT (tongue in cheek), they're at a structural
| disadvantage that can't be overcome through hard work alone.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Or they could just use paper and books and avoid the whole
| morass.
|
| There is zero need to be using "devices" in schools at
| least until High School, and I'd question even then.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It can work out cheaper to provide digital devices than
| providing plenty of books and of course they're a lot
| more flexible.
|
| Modern society is of course dominated by technology, so
| there's a strong argument for getting all kids to have
| experience in using it.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Except they can't control the fact that wealthier kids
| will have access to devices that give them Wikipedia and
| ChatGPT and other online knowledge sources. Being able to
| tell ChatGPT "explain to me the Byzantine empires
| history" then interrogate it on fine points to prep to
| write an essay in immeasurably more powerful than "here's
| a middle school textbook good luck understanding the
| nuances." This puts the kids without a device at a
| structural disadvantage, a more steep disadvantage than
| they're already at in society.
|
| Finally, there's an idea of digital literacy - the
| ability to use these tools to your advantage, and to
| navigate with sophistication the mental crack of
| algorithmic personalization. They will have a device at
| some point, and being taught at a younger age to be
| skeptical of mental crack might help weaken its hold
| (still to be seen!)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Wealthier kids have always had and always will have
| advantages like that. Wealthier kids probably also have
| their own room and a quiet organized place to do
| homework. They've probably been encouraged to read and
| been provided with books and other enrichment
| opportunities. I think most teachers know who these kids
| are and and know if they are turning in their own work or
| not.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I'm not talking about ChatGPT writing an essay for you.
| ChatGPT is also a pretty good teacher in itself, and can
| help you learn many topics and subjects by providing
| direct access to a tutor on most topics. Wikipedia is the
| only encyclopedia available, more or less.
|
| While schools can't give you a good family or a nice
| house to study in, they certainly can give you an iPad.
| dgroshev wrote:
| The CCTV meme is completely disconnected from reality. There
| are plenty of CCTV cameras around, but they aren't connected in
| any way, most of them are private, and in reality the police
| mostly can't be bothered to try and access the recordings.
| American obsession with Ring-like cloud connected cameras and
| their dealings with police forces are way more dystopian than
| the reality of CCTV as practiced in Britain.
|
| A good example is my partner getting pickpocketed on an empty
| tube train, which surely should make finding the person easy,
| right? Nope, the Met told me they'd need to go and pay the
| train maintenance company to retrieve the recordings from each
| carriage on the train, and they're not going to do that over a
| wallet.
|
| In practice it works pretty well, because it implicitly sets a
| very high bar on the severity of the crime that would warrant
| retrieving dozens of recordings and tracing people through
| them. Skripal poisoning or murders get that treatment and are
| solved pretty quickly. Small scale crime (or whatever dystopian
| thought crime scenarios people imagine) doesn't.
| guitarbill wrote:
| > and in reality the police mostly can't be bothered to try
| and access the recordings
|
| obviously this is the case if you are a normal citizen.
| imagine how fast they'd access the recordings if a police
| officer was hurt, or to identify protesters, etc
| dgroshev wrote:
| There are probably hundreds to thousands of protesters
| protesting for different causes in London alone every
| weekend. CCTV tracking of protesters is just not happening,
| it's absolutely unrealistic. Besides, you don't need street
| CCTV for that, local police van-based CCTV on mass
| gatherings is already a thing all over the globe.
|
| Stuff like Ring (centralised, pervasive, and already
| cooperating with authorities) is way more sus than CCTV on
| British streets.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Well, as a Brit, I agree with the surveillance society bit
| although the police don't even have time to go after the crims,
| so I suspect that most surveillance footage is ignored unless
| you're a political figure.
|
| As a devout atheist, I have a particular view of Christians and
| from what I can gather, the Christo-fascists in the U.S. trying
| to grab power are Christian in name only and represent almost
| the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus. I think it's more
| of a fascist movement that picks on the most gullible and
| easily led of groups for their support base.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "although the police don't even have time to go after the
| crims,"
|
| That's how it always works, even in the US. Selective
| enforcement of the laws against some group (or to favor some
| group).
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > Self-censorship for fear of being 'canceled' is putting a
| damper on the spirit of freedom.
|
| I'm always curious about what people mean by this, because
| usually its people upset they can't say the N-word or upset
| they're getting cancelled over being sex pests.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I guess main the problem is the secrecy. Even the article is
| unable to say exactly what information the app has, and who has
| access to it--they mention safeguarding leads being the users,
| but then talk about how "schools" get notified when a student has
| an encounter with the police. Does this information get sent only
| to qualified professionals with clear accountability, or does it
| get sent to a shared email address that the administrators'
| receptionist reads?
|
| The secretive approach to this is unsettling, because it implies
| they know they're doing something they'd get in trouble for. It
| sounds like the administration's response was "well, this app was
| public, parents could have read up on it if they wanted", which
| resembles the old _better to ask forgiveness than permission_
| tactic. Clearly, every part of this plan should have been
| proactively explained to parents beforehand.
| voakbasda wrote:
| Secrecy is an integral part of the effectiveness of the system.
| If you know how the algorithm works, you can find ways to game
| it. That doesn't make the practice acceptable, but I think it
| explains the approach.
|
| FWIW, the same secretive approach prevents anyone from knowing
| why their social media accounts were banned, or how changes to
| a website will affect their ranking in the search engines.
| Exposing the underlying algorithms creates an arms race that
| will lead to even bigger problems.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Hmm, but you can deploy essentially infinite resources for
| free in arbitrage to exploiting an algorithmic quirk in
| social media distribution, search engine rankings, etc.
|
| What exactly is the comparable threat model here? It's
| ridiculous. What are they exploiting, trace amounts of
| government resources? For one family?
| tempaway22641 wrote:
| There's no secrecy about it, the app, who has access to it and
| why is explained here:
|
| https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| ...with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"
| karaterobot wrote:
| As I said in the comment you replied to, it should have been
| proactive. What I see here is that there exists a single page
| of text somewhere on a government website, waiting for
| parents to find it if they search around. I didn't see
| anything in that article about parents being informed the
| school was even using the app, let alone given a chance to
| ask questions or, you know, consent.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Are they using similar software at Eton?
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