Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

> “If authority figures for youth say constant surveillance is OK, what happens when a romantic partner wants access to every message on their phone? Or an employer wants your social media password? Invasive monitoring isn’t acceptable, no matter who tries to do it, and personal privacy matters.”

I think that it is even worse than that. In a decade or two, we are going to learn the many cases of sexual abuse that this surveillance facilitated. To give such an absolute power to adults over other people's children never ends well. And the kind of person that wants to spy on kids and teenagers 24/7 is the kind of person that should not be allowed to work with them.

Spying on kids outrageous. The sad state of things is that the most valuable tool kids could learn now is that it's not strangers but authorities who are predatory and self interested, and you need to learn how to manage authorities and rules, which means, how do you extract value from them without being pulled in and subordinated to or hustled by them. Respect does not mean obedience, it means maintaining clear boundaries for something and recognizing what's safe and what isn't. Respect for authority today means treating it like fire or heavy machinery.

Raising kids being spied on is going to create a generation of spiritual fugitives and compromised, sadistic adult administrators. I could see home schooling being the next big tech platform trend, like a Montessori system with a way for parents to co-ordinate.

My schools tried to require school owned apple equipment that both restricted actions (couldn’t message with parents or email) and monitored all activity, even when used from home.

I forced my own equipment and they tried to install and reinstall various spyware throughout the year.

It seems like rather than proposing a basic system of assignments and material and grades, they are trying to treat as a wholly owned ecosystem.

This is also one of the things that frustrates me about “work computers” but at least they have a bit more claim since work computers are tools for work while school should be about learning.

Looks like I will be a parent in this mess!

My own kids are done, but I have my granddaughter to raise. (Rough, but she is great and will probably make me live longer, so no worries.)

This is going to be a fight! That level of surveillance is unacceptable. I have no plan yet, but will in a year or so. Guess it is wake up call time.

Seriously, I look back at my upbringing and what I was able to do for my kids, and shudder. I cannot imagine this ends well.

Can you? Seriously. Anyone want to talk me down, or just talk?

What makes this even scarier is the amount of technological incompetence the people have who are monitoring these things.

As far as I know, there’s no legal equivalent to HIPAA(which itself only scratches the surface of things) for ensuring the data and logs of these invasive systems stays under tight supervision. Now add in the fact that the people monitoring these systems may have an infinite amount of their own selfish agendas in mind for what to do with the information they gather… well, this will end poorly.

What bothers me most about this, is how there's even a debate about privacy. While we (western world we) acknowledge the need for privacy and anonymity when it applies to sources in corrupt regimes, depending on politics and time of the day, that same respect for privacy seems fleeting.

Children are always likely to learn something about themselves that displeases their parents. This can be anywhere from sexual orientation to religious inclinations. As a society we can and should enable this exploration - it only makes for a better outcome. Any society that can ongoingly say that critical thinking has led to the desired outcome is like (IMHO) to succeed and grow.

I fail to understand how we've moved from free speech to lack of privacy in such a short period of time. Today in many places, people are arrested for covering their faces in public - though not in the winter where such gear is warranted. People are arrested for expressing views (frequently violently, but not always) that are aligned with many, and abhorrent to others. Privacy would and should allow such exploration.

To me this is fundamental we ought be teaching, much like basic finance. Bother are important to get through life, and the ripple effects will be enormous. Clearly I have a bias.

I feel like educators watched Ferris Bueller’s day off, and decided they would crush that spirit with totalitarian tactics. What’s the point of this level of control?

Surveillance in schools is nothing new. The library computers back in the early 2000s had MasterEye, so that teachers could see whether students were using the PCs for homework or games, and block accounts accordingly.

I thought it would get better when I got older, but company Internet is also monitored and controlled through a proxy (ZScaler).

More egregious spying does frustrate me, because it breaks down trust (e.g. my mum reading my emails, or ex-girlfriend lying about having read my emails despite web history proving otherwise).

It does cause a chilling effect, especially when discipline is involved (punishment at a volunteer group for a humorous social media post means I don't post much online any more). I can't install a local web server on the company PC, and didn't even get admin privileges by default. Therefore my creativity has shifted towards hardware, because it's less restrictive.

These policies are not new, they're supported by management/HR/ICT who (perhaps correctly) assume that most people don't know what they're doing, and try to keep people "safe". There are causes worth fighting for, but privacy on other peoples' computers is a privilege that I've given up hope about changing.

Surveillance in schools is a symptom, not a cause.

To keep it focused on technology though, schools are super interesting - physical security is routinely violated. The iPhone really needs a dual-password mode, or some similar strategy, to protect its users.

I don’t have a bucket large enough for me to throw up in. Disgusting.

Ever increasing spyware, tracking this, recognition that, useless recommendations, ads everywhere I look.

This stuff is eating me up.

Gen Z-er here. I really appreciate that the EFF is writing a guide aimed at students. I was in high school only a few years ago, we were provided MacBook Pros (13-inch, mid-2012), which for me also served as my personal laptop (my own MBP had a failing hard drive). After a few weeks of using it in classes, I realized that none of the class activities required exotic software I couldn't figure out how to obtain, so I formatted the disk and reinstalled macOS (even though we had admin, I booted into recovery instead). For my younger sibling, who was in middle school at the time, they did not have admin access and there was a surveillance software that allowed the teacher to view their screen (and god knows what else), I decided to protect their privacy as well and reinstall the OS. This got me into a bit of trouble (for modifying "someone else's computer"), but to no long-term harm, and when they reinstalled the OS with the software I removed it again anyway.

EDIT: I also randomized my MAC address while using the school network using a script I wrote during a free period[0]

The worrying bit is that most gen-Zers have a radically different and weakened view of digital privacy. They are more than happy to use services with bad privacy track records just because "their friends are on it", network effects trump everything else. They self-censor constantly and mistakenly think that perceived impermanence (e.g. Snapchats, or Instagram stories) means things would be deleted forever. They happily share passwords with romantic partners, even viewing grades (!) (despite constant stories of blackmailing after breaking up), constantly reuse passwords, don't have TFA, the list goes on. Out of convenience, secondary schools use services like GSuite, but in doing so they condition the next generation of people to increasingly give up their privacy.

At one point I tried to deactivate my Facebook account, but the day after, ran into problems because my clubs were using it as a proto-Slack platform, so I bit the bullet and continued using it.

Now that many of us are in university, the surveillance gets more ridiculous, especially in a pandemic. Most notably, I've heard friends complain of software that tracks your eye and body movement, audio, video and screen while taking a test. Fortunately for me the most I've had to do is join a Zoom call while the (human) professor proctors.

More hacker culture-minded types take more precautions, but it is sadly an extremely minority opinion, IME.

[0] https://gist.github.com/siraben/c3133b39e470d1aed16fd71f42b8...

Why do people (schools) care?

What's the goal here?

How does tracking everything a student does help them and how can they justify wasting time and money on this?

Reads like this is about some highly guarded prison in a dystopian future.

This sucks. My school district used a bunch of money to buy every student chromebooks. I remember just a few years ago, back when I was in middle school, I helped unbox all the chromebooks that were shipped to the school - about 2500 of them. Just for one middle school. Every student having access to these laptops made some thing a lot easier, like using Canvas to submit work done on Google Docs.

However, this is in fact a real problem. Our district forced very obtrusive monitoring and blocking software, as well as literal bloat to be installed on the chromebooks - there's like 20 browser extensions that cannot even be turned off, making the already low performing chromebooks so laggy that it's hard to use. Obvious "bad sites" like pirate bay, porn, and etc are understandably blocked, but they also block access to "social media" like reddit and discord.

This doesn't sound that bad yet. The problem comes when students use their own devices instead of the school provided ones. Some sites and services are still blocked at the internet level, but can by bypassed easily. This means that, students with own laptops could communicate with each other using services that chromebook students cannot access. This means that students from families with lower income or with more siblings literally get blocked out of friend groups, with access only to heavily monitored google chat. During distance learning, this problem has only been made worse.

Additionally, district chromebooks are absolutely no less distracting with the various censorship and monitoring and bloat - kids would still much rather browse the limited internet than pay much attention in class. I think there was some study that showed laptops drastically reduced student's academic performance on average. (Though I think access to computer is really powerful for learning how to access internet resources and developing actual knowledge.)

TLDR my opinion and experience on technology + kids

One way I try to influence my friends with teenage kids is to gift their kids or their parents Doctorow's Little Brother.

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/30142

Perhaps I date myself with that recommendation, but I consider it an important reading.

We changed the URL from https://www.eff.org/press/releases/schools-are-spying-studen..., which points to this.

I'm fine with school equipment and software being fully locked down, but the facial recognition and automated behavior detection (let alone correction) is way beyond the line.

Why are kids, the ones we're supposed to protect, being used as lab rats here? (Rhetorical—it's because they have no agency and the parents are kept at arm's length. Near-perfect conditions for abuse of power, however well-intentioned.)

What if the student government could declare no confidence in the school administration and have them removed? Would at the very least get more kids interested in civics.

I believe we should accept mass surveillance in our lives as a public utility and heavely regulate/democratize it. Mass surveillance is too tempting for any organization to be fought effectively. In the case of youth education i see a strong case of publicly streaming kindegarten activities delayed of few second with a software that obscure facial traits and personal names in the audio (unfiltered version can be requested by police). This is a cheap way to keep accountable child carer while protecting childs privacy

I wouldn't expect most students to be able to follow this, if they want to enjoy their youth.

The problem is the school system, and people with a patronising ideal of what the State or affiliated companies should be able to do.

More and more happy to be living in the EU where this kind of surveillance nonsense can't be implemented as easily as in other parts of the world, thanks to privacy laws.

Schools in the US are usually required by state law to provide a baseline level of content filtering and auditing on any school operated network, device and accounts. The school district has the right to choose which proxy service to use, but not wether to uses one or not. To get this fixed it has to be done at the state legislative level.

This will be controversial, but an awesome form of self-defense is wrong information. Flood information infrastructures with spam, rumors and fake news.

We should teach kids to game these systems. Eventually they would do so anyway. The surveillance abuse that already happened is just a small example of what future pupils have to content with.

The one sort of surveillance schools need is live webcams so parents can monitor lesson content

Spying off hours is unacceptable, but during class teachers should be able to see what students are doing on district-provided equipment.