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Comment by mLuby | Hacker News Reader

Searches about suicide/murder-related topics could lead to life-saving interventions. One sympathizes with families that didn't or couldn't read the warning signs, and understands why they'd whole-heartedly support monitoring.

The other side is that children learn there is an intense adult response to certain topics. That may lead to excessive interest in that topic. Or ever more secretive behavior. Or an inability to challenge authority.

On one side of the balance is maybe a student's life. On the other is more students' mental health and autonomy. Life usually wins, but only history can judge whether that's wise.

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Why stop with monitoring the computer? It would be easier to just plant a device to monitor thoughts and every action. Surely, this would only be used for good, and after all, it’s all about safety.

The monitoring for safety argument is merely an excuse to eliminate the right to privacy and shift the power to a government entity. Never in the history of mankind has this power ever been abused.

> It would be easier to just plant a device to monitor thoughts and every action.

If this were possible schools would already be doing it.

Every action has a consequence, and intentions do not matter. What will the consequences of millions of non-life-saving interventions be? We need to keep in mind that we are rolling these technologies out in an entirely blanket fashion, affecting millions of children and adolescents, and we are doing it to prevent exceptionally rare events. In the aftermath of Columbine, schools received lists of "warning signs" derived from nothing objective or accurate. These lists painted targets on the back of dozens of kids. At every single school. Every single year. The lists claimed to assist in identifying potential school shooters. Shooters who were students we know for a fact were present at only a single school, and only one or two every couple years. Why weren't these lists discarded immediately as they were very visibly and provably wrong? The answer to that question is what will support the continued expansion of surveillance in schools relentlessly, even in the face of evidence that it does more harm than good.

Your response applies equally to a world where every kid has their own privacy-enabled, perfectly secure free software phone with data monitored and occasionally transmitted by an AI agent that is programmed jointly by the child and a technically-minded parent.

Meanwhile, the article is about third-party data slurpers sitting in between the school and the Chromebooks that are supplied to a captive audience of millions of minors. The tradeoff here isn't between security and freedom. It's between whatever security the third-party claims to deliver and the risks from what the third-party actually does with the data to turn a profit. We have to gain insight into that fundamental question before we can begin reflect on your point.

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