Schools are helping police spy on kids’ social media activity | Hacker News Reader

Schools are helping police spy on kids’ social media activity

washingtonpost.com

102 pointsraddad75 comments

At times I like to feel like 1984 didn't come true ever, and that our limited surveillence, in the grand scheme of things, is almost tolerable in comparison. But every time I see somethijg like this I change my mind. Everything here is about infiltrating the privacy of children and not about their safety. As soon as we get parents to accept this surveillence for their children, we know we're not far off from not just mass surveillance of metadata, but large scale surveillance of all Internet communication we conduct on a more-or-less personal level. If the current parents are okay with it, how much more will future parents allow now that the precedent is being set? How much intrusion will these children be willing to take once they're grown up?

It will change once our future Politicians, CEOs, Generals, Judges, Celebs etc start seeing their lives and decisions get effected by all that data about them out there. Until then its hard to imagine anything changing.

Ofcourse Google and Facebook can stop being robotic slaves to advertising revenue and go the Wikipedia route. But that would be like expecting the big banks and rating agencies to do what was right at the peak of the subprime crisis.

Its amazing to watch how some of the smartest people on the planet can get stuck on tracks they can't get of.

Highly recommend Douglas Rushkoff on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass

> It will change once our future Politicians, CEOs, Generals, Judges, Celebs etc start seeing their lives and decisions get effected by all that data about them out there.

that's a bunch of wishful thinking if not baloney. everybody's in that game. blackmail will be so inflationary that it won't work. the only difference to today will be much, much easier intrusion if not outright ban of privacy. now you don't tell me that won't happen. just look at the billions of sheep screwing around on facebook, uploading personal pictures to all kinds of clouds and using pictures of themselves on linked in and twitter, throwing their fingerprints into every database there is just to get a drivers license or take a flight somewhere, going along with secret courts, not objecting to international flight passenger records exchange, still believing the stories they're told about syria, lybia, iraq, iran, russia. still watching fox news et al, still voting for suckers like clinton, sanders, trump. everybody still believes at least some part of the charade.

we got to where we are without anybody noticing or at least while ridiculing anybody who actually noticed and spoke out. this will go on and sheep will lose.

sheep are sheep.

I think we need a fundamental change of how the internet works to make it happen.

Something like http://www.idni.org/tauchain could do this.

We need provable code, and the ability to communicate directly with each other rather than to rely on servers owned by third parties.

> Ofcourse Google and Facebook can stop being robotic slaves to advertising revenue and go the Wikipedia route. But that would be like expecting the big banks and rating agencies to do what was right at the peak of the subprime crisis

The big companies are not the scariest parties. While I don't like what they are doing, Google, etc, kind of protect my data. What worries me most is what the government does with my data. They can do almost anything they want, track my every movement, see what I like and save it forever. While Google does the same, they need to protect that very careful because if this data is misused (and it gets publicized), they could lose billions (which they could not afford to do). If a government agency screws up, there is an "investigation", and, after a few weeks/months the media stops reporting.

I'm not saying what either party does is good, but Google and Facebook are not as worrying to me as a government who will only use the data in my best interest and has a perfect track record of safeguarding my data.

Uhhhhhh where do you think the government is getting that data?

A better question is why are they allowed to get that data?

I don't think google is serving them that data on a silver plate.

Of course they are, once they get a subpoena.

Their systems could be engineered such that it's impossible to comply with such requests. But they're not. The reason they're not is... you guessed it:

> Google and Facebook [being] robotic slaves to advertising revenues

If Trump's porn history isn't leaked soon we'll know this isn't going to happen

> It will change once our future Politicians, CEOs, Generals, Judges, Celebs etc start seeing their lives and decisions get effected by all that data about them out there.

That's happening now. Savy students with an eye on becoming a Judge have been sanitizing their online and public presence, making it very difficult to figure out what their stance is on any given topic. I imagine that prospective politicians are doing the same thing.

Here's what the American Bar association has to say about social media:

http://www.americanbar.org/publications/gp_solo/2015/july-au...

I firmly believe that at this point it is only the hackers who can stop it.

Until these people experience having all their data publicly exposed there is nothing that will drive the point of privacy home.

Unfortunately western hackers have been silenced already.

> Unfortunately western hackers have been silenced already.

Exactly. Does anyone believe the 10-year sentences in federal penitentiaries were really about breaking into some servers that didn't belong to them?

Or, in this case, the kids can stop it by not posting publicly.

If anyone is upset here, it should be with parents for not teaching their kids.

It's scary seeing reality start to match 1984, but scarier still seeing new avenues of surveillance come to light that Orwell couldn't have predicted.

Orwell didn't write about FitBits or Chromebooks.

"limited surveillence"

of course.

The thing with surveillance is that it creeps up one step at a time and very few people realize it at the beginning. By the time the masses wake up (and care) it will be too late. In the coming years, I wouldn't be surprised if more governments follow Kuwait's DNA style, even democratic ones :(

How much privacy should one expect to have when posting on a publicly accessible website?

We, as humans, aren't well equipped to properly measure the impact of posting a lot of little things which, individually, don't give a lot of information away (if any). "Big Data" projects and tools such as these allows agents to learn more about us than we have ever consciously given away.

For example, if you post only about being sick, then about your craving for pickles, would you expect an agent to be able to identify that you're pregnant, and given your posting timeline, identify the due date with remarkable accuracy? Ad companies have been doing this with browsing behavior for awhile.

The only way to avoid this particular threat is to not participate at all, something you will have a ridiculously hard time convincing a teenager of.

None. Schools should be teaching students the dangers of posting publicly, not fostering and then exploiting the ignorance.

What are we paying scholar for? To educate students!

About as much as you get when you say something in public space like a park. While potentially "anyone" can hear you, it's not going to be used against you 10 years from now to label you a criminal.

>and that our limited surveillence, in the grand scheme of things, is almost tolerable in comparison

How is the surveillance we suffer under limited in any sense?

So basically the school system doesn't want oversight?

FTA:

> Details of the 12 police investigations that stemmed from searches in the past year have not been divulged by the school system. The school system told the Orlando Sentinel that it doesn't want public details of the program to interfere with its effectiveness.

It wants privacy, and doesn't want to be surveilled.

I'm not sure, but the irony is so thick we might need a new word.

Orwellian.

That was my first thought. Who is watching the watchmen?

And as someone else noted, how do they figure out which social media accounts belong to students?

Clearly they don't reveal what these incidents were about because they're probably reporting students to the police for underage consumption of alcohol or something.

I'd be ok with this... if it only monitored posts made during school hours on days students were present. But it doesn't, so I'm not ok with this.

Looking on the bright side, a bunch of kids are gonna get a crash course in basic opsec aka "not posting stuff you wouldn't want your boss/the cops/the entire world to see online" unfortunately this will probably screw up the lives of a lot of students who come into contact with law enforcement when they really just need help.

I was prepared to be upset, but I'm having trouble seeing why I should. The article seems to indicate this software only looks at public posts. It'd be different if they used fake accounts or got "snitch" students to obtain access. But public posts? They're essentially broadcasting this information to the world. As you say, they will quickly learn privacy practices, and everything gets better.

I agree. Contact with law enforcement always has the potential to become very costly - in lives, freedom, liberty, or simply reputation. I am not sanguine about the effects of broadening this contact, and inviting the state apparatus into more peoples' lives at an even earlier stage.

Not to mention that it conditions youngsters to accept state surveillance/intrusion into their personal lives

The whole point of making public posts is because they want lots of people to see them. So who cares if the school sees them too? That's part of the public. It's not spying if the spyee is intentionally broadcasting the information and wants everyone to see it.

Imagine if a teacher walked past some kids bullying their classmate in the hall. She overhears the insults they're shouting and then calls the bullies in to tell them off. Isn't that what we want? Do we want school staff to turn a blind eye to bullying and stand by when they know who's doing it and what they're doing?

Except that students don't know what is public. They often don't even care if the whole world can see that because they don't know how it affects them now or later.

While it has gotten better (I've noticed that more and more students use s private profile on Twitter, they still accept every follower). It is kind of like if teachers start disgusting as students to invade their privacy, which they have no right to do.

>Imagine if a teacher walked past some kids bullying their classmate in the hall.

Except this is absolutely nothing like that. Schools should only have authority over kids at school. Schools in the USA already to a pathetic enough job educating kids before expending effort to spy on them at all times. Schools should be for teaching - not spying - period.

I'm so glad I grew up some twenty to thirty years prior to this.

I was bullied and there was nothing any grown up could have done without me telling them about the bullying.

Non the less, as said above, I am glad to not gave to grow up in this panopticon.

It seems every time there's a mass shooting or a tragic suicide, people find out there were a bunch of social media posts beforehand that clearly broadcast the perpetrator's intent. Every time we ask "Why didn't anyone see this coming?"

Well, this is us "looking" to see these things coming, but now analyzing publicly available information is a violation of privacy?

Its a question of false positives, and also the chilling effect. If we're all under a microscope that changes society fundamentally.

Kids talk about lots of things, in jest or half serious. All the time. Getting paranoid about it would be a worse problem.

As I heard Hodge say on Criminal Minds, "All teenaged boys profile as sociopaths"

That's because the school shootings should be addressed by finding a root cause (after all, they seem to be a very much USA localized issue) instad of more orwellian surveillance which leads to false accusations and abuse.

>after all, they seem to be a very much USA localized issue

Absolutely false. Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Israel, and Switzerland all had more shooting rampages (and deaths thereof) per capita than the United States (at least from 2009-2013, which the data covers). http://archive.is/f4gbv

Does USA being a 4th most common place of shootings invalidate my point of trying to find a root cause instead of surveilance?

Not at all. I just hate the meme of "the US is super violent and dangerous". In reality, deaths from rampages are more or less statistically negligible. The idea that we have to "solve" rampages at all might be incorrect. It may be an unproductive use of resources, when there are many bigger causes of death that we could probably mitigate more effectively for the same cost.

I disagree with your way of reading the numbers. United states has 38 "Total Fatal Rampage Shooting Incidents (2009-2013)". All other countries has 0, 1 or 2 incidents. How can dividing the victims per capita can help you understand if this kind of things happen more often in a country than in other?

Not just per-capita victims. If you read the chart's third column:

> Fatal Rampage Shooting Incidents (2009-2013) Per 1,000,000

The U.S. is 0.12, putting it behind Norway (0.19), Finland (0.37), Slovakia (0.19), Israel (0.25), and Switzerland (0.25).

Simply looking at the raw number of shootings is misleading at best because:

1. Countries with a larger population are typically at higher risk of more shootings. (The two countries with >= 1/3 as large of a population as the U.S. are Japan and Mexico.)

2. It does not take into account culture or socioeconomic issues (other than only sampling the "Industrialized West")

3. Countries with more firearms will typically have a higher risk or more shootings

When public institutions are engaging in industrialized surveillance (of children, no less), it's a violation of privacy.

We also have no idea if Facebook posts are actually a good indicator of propensity to commit violence. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a proper study indicating that this may be the case.

Well, it's apparently public posts that are being searched. So kids just need to learn some OPSEC, no?

But indeed, it must suck, growing up in the panopticon :(

Good idea for nonprofit

Or get their own lobbyists if they don't like it.

message to kids: Grow up rich or feel the boot of the state on your sorry head for life.

I'm not normally in favor of surveillance, or reporting students to police for minor infractions. But for me the key sentence is here:

> collects data from public posts on students' social media accounts

Calling this "spying" is disingenuous. There's no spying going on if person A posts something to be available to the general public, and then person B, a member of the general public (in this case the school's social media subcontractor), looks at the post.

Unless it's done in form of massive data collection targeted at a (minor!) group.

Normally I'd agree with you, but Facebook and other social media sites have controls to make your posts private. If you choose to make them public, you are giving your consent to have them trawled and searched by anyone and everything on the Internet. Kids aren't dumb. They can learn how to make posts private and how to limit who sees what they post. If they choose not to and their parents do not get involved, then I don't see the issue with the schools doing this.

While kids aren't dumb, it doesn't mean they fully understand side effects of permanent posts for future careers. Heck, a lot of adults don't understand that and now you expect teenagers to be fully aware how damaging to your longterm career can posts be?

This pretty much reads like victim blaming.

I'm 24 now and I can remember from eighth grade through graduation there was this assembly/ seminar where they brought someone in and berated you to not post stupid stuff on the Internet (MySpace, AOL instant messenger era). Seemed to be pretty effective..

Also, who's the victim in your hypothetical? The kid getting bullied, or the kid who gets caught bullying through this tool - because it sounds like the former.

Small differences eventually become a difference in kind.

We are used to thinking about concepts like "in public" and "spying" in traditional human-scale situations. Many of our cultural and legal structures implicitly assume human-scale limitations; we understand that you lose your expectation of privacy when a conversation moves from inside your house to the public shared spaces like the street.

We are also used the spread of information as something that has noise, limited reach, and having a cost that limits both how far the information spreads and how long it lasts.

Combined, this mean it was usually easy say things that might technically be public, but in practice were de facto a private conversation. This is great for kids, who are still learning how society works, risk assessment, and how they want to express themselves publicly. Children need this kind of sorta-public, in-practic-private environment so they can learn and develop. This will often involve making mistakes. A vast majority of the time we simply call this "being a kid". The public side of the situation allows for a parent/teacher/whatever to (hopefully) offer education when a kid makes an embarrassing or rude comment - or a post that could be interpreted as threatening - while the transient nature means the child can move on having learned from their mistake.

What is happening right now is that the underlying assumptions are changing. Information no longer goes away. Far more is recorded and the de-facto-private aspect of many situations is being eroded. In some situations, it's already gone. When life is recorded as the norm, there is no room for mistakes, no allowance for growth, no room to discover by experiment0 how social expression works. We already see this on the internet ever time someone complains about hostility in forums, "cyber bullying", and even the moderation drama here on HN.

This means we need new definitions for what "in public" or a "public post" means. We really need entire new social structures to deal with this brave new world of computing and data. This will take time to convert. I don't know what those social structures should look like, but I do know that applying pre-information-age heuristics to modern internet-based, always-recording situations isn't the answer.

TL;DR - see CGP Grey's recent discussion of why precedent matters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ZpsxnmmbE

I'm curious exactly what level of visibility is considered "public" in this case. I'm willing to be my definition is very different from their definition.

I wonder what would happen if schools spent their full energy and focus trying to, you know, like teach kids stuff?

2016 Police Report: 4 kids were successfully stopped from stealing candy. Parents suing us because kids suffered psychological damage and now have a criminal record, but we all know that this is just caused by bad parenting.

Need more funding to fight illegal sugar highs. Illegal candy is a gateway drug.

They just need some speed, I mean adderall.

Watch if they refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the national symbol, punish them for transgressing private property moral codes... if we have so many armed bureaucrats, they might as well be constantly judging everyone.

And people wonder why kids are using apps like Snapchat that are intentionally designed to be incomprehensible to outsiders...

Providing the young with a deep distrust of all things Facebook? Sounds like educators are actually doing their jobs.

What better way to prepare children for life under secret, quasi-legal mass surveillance by officials.

If the innocent are caught up in the dragnet, the neologism collatoral intrusion exists.

Freedom from warantless search never applied to children's diaries, schools are in loco parentis.

If an overactive imagination doesn't make one culpable it cannot be ignored by liable officials and may be an indictor of intent, disposition or a pre-crime.

As a society we have decided no price is too high for child safety.

The only flaw I can see in this scheme are officials with less than perfect judgement or their own prejudices.

If this is monitoring public Facebook posts, how much data can they really get, given that posts are only visible to friends by default?

How do they identify which social media accounts belong to which students?

been happening for years...

It's even worse in the UK:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1...

I'm trying to understand what was going through peoples' heads for something like this to happen in the first place, but I'm drawing a blank.

Is this what mass hysteria looks like?

> Is this what mass hysteria looks like?

That's one way of putting it. In reference to that article on trying to find supposedly "radicalized" kids that might become "terrorists", it's probably more accurate to say this is what fascism/totalitarianism[1] looks like, or perhaps simply racism.

While it won't explain what's going through the heads of the people causing this crap, I recommend listening to some of the people that are being targeted in the 32c3 talk "The Price Of Dissent"[3]. It doesn't have many answers, but it does paint a very good picture of the current state of fear, xenophobia, and oppression.

[1] The UK isn't the only country heading rapidly towards fascism. On the other side of the pond we have "banned from CNN" Roger Stone managing Trump's campaign tactics, who just promised to "'disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates' who were involved in 'stealing' the nomination from Trump"[2]. This could get really ugly, really fast.

[2] http://www.wptz.com/politics/the-return-of-roger-stone/39099...

[3] https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7443-the_price_of_dissent

I don't see how anybody can complain if public posts are being analyzed.

Why couldn't/shouldn't people complain about it? It's like how you can be against paparazzi. The fact that something is legal doesn't make it morally right or immune to criticism.

Paparazzi ambush people going on with their daily lives - they have no choice but to venture outside (into public places) sometime. That's hardly the same as deliberately publishing something on a public network.

That said, sure, you can complain about it. I guess I just don't see the point.

I can't comment on this specific school district, but in my own school district, there have been a fair number of instances where it was discovered, after an incident, that students had been planning a fight or physical confrontation for days in advance on social media. If the district had programs like this in place, it could have actually improved student safety. I know many here are claiming that this is just a pretense for monitoring students, but that's not what it looks like from my perspective.

>planning a fight or physical confrontation

Oh no, not a physical confrontation! Before you know it, these kids will be overseas in some dessert shooting people.

Sometimes getting physical is the only solution to bullying.

It seems like it's the parents' position to monitor the actions of their children on social media, not the school.

What if they had been planning a fight from the public park. Should the school or police monitor their communication there? What if they had been planning a fight from their front yard. Should the school or police monitor them there? What about by phone? What about in their bedroom?

"Planning a fight" is just communication. I don't think the school or the police should be monitoring children's communication (outside of the school premises, in the case of the school).

To clarify, the students were doing so during school hours, presumably on school property, possibly even using the school Internet connection or school computers.

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