Spy tech that followed kids home for remote learning
the74million.org
the74million.org
I firmly believe that a hundred years, people will look back on practices like this and shake their heads at the appalling attitudes their primitive ancestors had towards children. But I imagine that's little comfort to the kids subject to this kind of abuse.
> that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good"
Are actually two separate problems with our society.
Problem 1: denying privacy to children, various forms of helicopter parenting. This you've covered, and I agree this is our era's way of mistreating children.
Problem 2: "by team of strangers". as a Service. This is a much broader topic to cover it all here, but constrained to the context of data processing and children - social-wide, we're too eager to entrust sensitive matters to random strangers, giving them too much leeway, as if they weren't incentivized to abuse it in every way they can get away with.
People are having ridiculously inconsistent "trust functions" here. You wouldn't give this level of access to a small shop from your neighborhood that offered you a service, but you give it to a random tech startup from far away, just because the guy looks kind of creepy and the startup has a shiny web page. Even though a realistic threat model would suggest the former can be trusted way more than the latter (less incentives and less capability to screw you over, and they live near you). It's like most people can't internalize the lesson, even though they're being repeatedly screwed over by almost every business they interact with.
What pisses me off more, is when it's the other party that inserts some third parties into the process. When you have a kid attending a school, there's a degree of trust and responsibility shared between you and the school. But then the school outsources data management or remote learning to some random vendors, vendors who absolutely cannot be trusted. And as a parent, you can't do much about it.
One day in the future people will look back at our times and think about all of us and most of the market the way we today think about literal snake oil salesmen and people duped by them.
I don't understand why the parents are letting the school into their kids heads while they're at home to begin with. School administrators shouldn't be parenting (and we should ask ourselves why this seems reasonable for them to explicitly assume parenting roles over all the kids), and they should probably be more concerned about what kinds of porn their teachers are watching. They should never, ever be concerned with the question of which kids are watching which porn unless it somehow literally cannot be avoided because the kid drags it explicitly into the classroom.
If so, this is no different than your employer actively monitoring your activity on their devices.
When I was 12, I didn't sign an employment contract with my school and they didn't pay me. Have times changed so much? Why would you imply that two relationships are in any way comparable?
Owning a device does not grant you a right to violate people's privacy - if you lease a car, is it okay for the rental company to install cameras in it and record you having sex in it?
Whether or not you are being paid is irrelevant - the key part is that some other entity is providing hardware that they own and allowing you to use it under certain conditions. Those conditions are: use it for the purposes agreed upon, and the device will be monitored to ensure it is being used for only the purposes agreed upon.
I certainly don't think we're doing our kids any favors with the constant and forced surveillance 24/7. But I can understand why an organization wants to keep their hardware managed.
The only difference here is that kids are powerless, unlike customers renting sportscars for $$.
For one, I already said I agree that children's privacy shouldn't be invaded - that's not the point. The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Secondly, you first talked about a lease and now you seem to be talking about cars in general? But also companies which issue $150,000 sports cars? (Which company provides $150,000 sports cars, by the way? So I can apply.)
For what it's worth, every corporate fleet vehicle I've had the pleasure of using has been strictly monitored by the company who owns it - just like they monitor the other hardware that they own and lend me.
And if you're not talking about corporate owned vehicles - we're back to square one. Leases are different contracts with different expectations than loaned devices.
Why should that right win out in this case over the user's right to fiduciary technology that puts their interests first?
A company car can be worn out by driving it around for frivolous reasons, so the company will impose a condition that you can't do that, and monitor you to make sure you obey the restriction you agreed to.
A school issued laptop is not going to wear out any faster or slower depending on what you type on it. And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
The school might have a legitimate interest in whether the students are leaving their laptops plugged in all night mining Bitcoins and wearing out the battery. They don't have any legitimate interest in the contents of the students' diaries, whether they're written using school-issued tools or not.
Teaching students to expect this sort of treatment from people with power over them is corrosive to society.
Are you sure about that? I'm not allowed to use my employer's laptop for personal use. Why am I allowed to use the school's laptop for personal use?
> That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy
You like to talk about rights. Doesn't the school have the right to say, "You can't use this device unless you comply with the (arbitrary) rules that I make. One of those rules is that I'm going to spy on your use of this device. If you do not like it, you are free to use your own device instead."
The school has a right to impose conditions or monitor, to the same extent that anyone lending someone something has that right. But in this case it is in conflict with the child's rights, in a few ways:
1. The child may not know about the monitoring. 2. The child, being a child, may not actually have a feasible way to use their "own" device. The school-issued device may be the only device they have access to or that they or their family can afford. 3. The school may expect or require them to use the school-issued device in certain situations, and may not appreciate it when the child troops into class with their own personal machine, or tries to take a test from home on an ordinary PC. 4. The child has a right to a good education from the school, to make them into an adult that one is happy to share a society with. A good education should teach a person not to tolerate arbitrary restrictions, conditions, or monitoring without good cause, especially from a governmental agency.
Finally, I believe users of computing devices have the right to be able to rely on those devices as extensions of themselves. Having somebody else all up in your computing experience is a lot like having somebody else inside your head, and in general it shouldn't be allowed.
Except you know, all the non-hardware related issues computers can face such as viruses, ransomware, etc.
>And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
I'll need a source on that. My kids school laptop comes with strict "no personal use" instructions.
Look at the "what Gaggle flagged on kids' computers" chart: none of this is "video games" or "wasting time on YouTube" or "visiting sketchy domains that might host ransomware". If that sort of stuff was in "Other", "Other" would be the biggest category. If personal use of the devices or accounts outside the particular areas Gaggle scans for is against policy, the school doesn't seem to be using this tool to try and enforce that policy.
They are instead using the tool to examine everything the students do or store that might be related to these topics, whether it happens during personal or academic use.
Or we should aggressively throw that idea out and take privacy rights to take precedence over corporate ownership of property. If the organization isn't willing to trust you with that device without constantly monitoring you, they shouldn't "lend" it to you (since "lending" in this context is always coercive and its mandated by your employer as well and you cannot effectively opt-out).
I thoroughly reject that right as being valid. It should never have been invented as a concept, and you should not be defending that supposed "right".
If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them, and I expect the article to be returned to me in good condition.
And you keep arguing that "surely you understand that they must have right" which is exactly what I'm rejecting, and its very frustrating that you can't even seem to comprehend that someone would strenuously object to your premise to begin with. You just keep on restating that I MUST agree with you that they have that right as a premise to the argument. I reject the premise. If we can't get past that there's no point to this any more, we can't even have an argument about the beneficial effects of rejecting that premise and the horrible effects that keep getting worse and worse of being brainwashed into accepting those "rights" like they're physical laws and not something that we can choose to change.
And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed to accept things that never should have been accepted.
Because I am able to separate what is reality and what my ideal is. My ideal aligns closely with yours. But I try not to let it cloud what the reality is; mainly that organizations which provide assets for free to employees/students are allowed to stipulate conditions of use, one of which may be monitoring.
>If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them
You are absolutely allowed to give a laptop to a friend and say "By the way, this has a keylogger on it. If you want to use it, just know that keystrokes are being recorded". You, as the owner of that device, have every right to do that. The key being that you notified the other party (like, for example, terms and conditions of use). Trust doesn't even come into the equation. Would that make you a shitty friend? Yes. Can you still do it? Yes.
>And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed
Jesus that escalated quickly. I am saying that organizations are allowed to have terms of use on their equipment, one of those terms being that the device is monitored, and suddenly I'm the cause of the surveillance state.
1. They are not 'free', they are paid for with taxes
2. stop equating employees and children, it's daft, any judge would throw out such argument without a second thought
3. there are currently like 30 active lawsuits against schools and states for spying. The case law is not set on this matter, it's a new phenomenon and now is the chacne to set the recond strain.
4. Just because you put 'your house now belongs to me' or 'you are now my slave' into terms and condition doesn't make it legally valid.
Indeed it did and it reminds me of a lot of conversations I’ve seen on Twitter with unreasonable people who hold the entire world to their personal ideals, everything else be damned.
Just don’t engage.
That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy. You can demand compensation for damage, but you can't control their life.
If it did exist, it would lead to dystopia. A microcontroller with Wi-fi cost like $0.5, in the next 10 years they will be in library books, pens, shoes, do you want to live in a future where literally everyone can spy on you and fine you every time you let wind because it's against term 527 in T&C?
Who says you have a right to privacy on a device you do not own, provided to you by another organization for a specific use case (school-related learning) and which comes with terms and conditions of use (which, more than likely, includes a monitoring clause)?
Hate to break it to you, but schools and organizations have rights too. One of those being "if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property.".
The law does. You paid for the device, or a car or a house you are renting. For the duration on your possesion the owner does not get to randomly violate your rights. If they are not happy with it, they should not have given you the device.
"if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property."
While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house, and a waiver in case it ends up being child porn .
Also give them a waiver in case they record a conversation with your lawyer, doctor or employer, breaking attorney-client privilidge, medical privilidge or sensitive conversation with your employer.
You aren't renting a car. You are being provided a laptop, owned by someone else, and allowed to use it subject to the fact that you follow their terms and conditions, which happens to include monitoring. Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving.
>While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house,
If you wanna make sex tapes on company or school provided laptops... By all means, go for it. But I have no idea what it has to do with this conversation
You are being provided a vehicle, owned by someone else. There is no difference, neither is an act of charity
You dont have to use a car, but your kid has to be at school, and has to use their laptop, so you don't have a choice to reject the 'terms and conditions'.
Is you kid's privacy worth less than $300 laptop?
"Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving."
American Civil Liberties Union director Vic Walczak said that “the school district's clandestine electronic eavesdropping violates constitutional privacy rights, intrudes on parents' right to raise their children and may even be criminal under state and federal wiretapping laws.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_Scho...
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/is-your-school-spyin...
The amount of folks here willing to jump to defend the 'rights' of organisations at the expence of personal liberty is disturbing
Nonsense. If I rent an apartment, the landlord very clearly has no rights to fill it with cameras to monitor use.
Sure, there's a contract that if I damage the premises they can bill me after the fact. But that's it.
Not at all, no. Ownership of the device (worth very little, maybe I'd feel different if it was a $100+K instrument on loan) should morally grant no spying rights whatsoever to the owner.
Privacy of the person, but particularly a child, far outweighs the importance of any cheap gadget.
The fact that you're sitting there wondering how I could possibly object to something so normal and obviously correct is precisely the entire fucking problem.
None of these invasions of privacy should be allowed or considered normal.
Homework, no?
But once my oldest (9) started disappearing with his iPad for too often and too long, I did browse his YouTube history (I had to ask him to unlock his iPad, as I don't have or know the passcode). And after that I blocked YouTube, as there was just too much adult content for a nine year old. I have also made it a rule that computing and screen time needs to happen in family areas
I still feel like I violated his trust. But I also feel like I can't responsibly allow him to have access to YouTube or the full Internet without experiencing negative effects to his emotional development. I am unsure if I am a helicopter parent in this situation, and if I went too far
Did the same for my 6 year old. Yes, there is a lot of stuff I dont want my kid watching.
He used to watch video game videos, mainly by other kids, so I didnt mind.
Then one day, I heard him swearing. Looks like some (a lot?) of these kids swear, even in games like minecraft. And they use sexist language; again, these are videos by kids, some just a few years older than my son.
And now Youtube is banned.
I dont understand where this "helicopter" parent thing comes from. Like another commenter says, will you let you kids eat anything they want? Watch TV till 11 in the night?
Or steal your parent's credit card. Its an American company after all they use their CC for everything and a CC is completely normal for identification for some ungodly reason that I do not comprehend.
My reasoning is that these platforms (as we've recently seen) know full well that they cause harm. That gets verified pretty regularly by independent researchers. Standing by and letting a preteen deal with that on their own has predictable enough results: my job is to Sherpa kiddo through life and part of that involves deploying myself as a kind of surrogate sense of self regulation when his fails. I'm pretty liberal and allow privacy on most things (I would never read a diary etc) but draw a line between what he consumes and produces. Privacy is for production, at the moment. Private consumption can come later.
tl;dr you did right, imo.
Yes and also to protect him from the adults who author addictive, compelling content that a 9-year old can’t be mature enough to protect against.
If you don’t regulate his internet activity, why do you regulate his diet? Why not allow him to eat whatever he wants whenever he wants?
Now, it is clear that the diffusion of digital technology invariably takes us to different pastures. We are not in Kansas anymore when everybody carries a connected supercomputer. Both parenting and education will be impacted and will never be the same again. A new equilibrium must be found. But what is happening in the past decade or so is just an unwarranted wild west that capitalizes (literally) on ignorance, inertia, confusion, regulatory capture and political dysfunction.
Most services do not have the direct and easy to apply capability to physically harm you or your family.
How is this remotely true? The stranger, after you stop paying them for the service, might spread lies about you, treat your child badly, show your child things you wouldn’t want (guns, drugs, movies, etc). The faceless corporation directly profits off the information it gains, but you can be sure the access control and security measures taken by them mean it’ll never be used to oust something embarrassing about you to your community. Only a dozen or so engineers at Google have direct database access and all of that access is logged and audited.
How could you possible write this, did you live under a rock for the past 10 years?
Big Co's have literally extorted people and leaked their sex tapes, Vigilante placed bounties on people's heads, Equifax left national databases unsecured, phone operstors have sold realtime location to the highest bigger and left the website to access it unsecured, the list goes on an on. Unbelievable!
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shells-out-millions-of-d...
I can be free to do what ever I like, with a complete lack of privacy. Inversely I can lose all my freedom but have relative privacy (i.e solitary confinement). It seems more, repercussion curtails freedom, not privacy. (Perhaps a pointless distinction).
Imagine the principal was a bit of a bully, and students knew he could sometimes read their chat messages. They would probably be a lot less likely to talk with each other, or even with their parents, about the bad behavior of the principal. To my mind, this would make the students less free.
Have you seen "never talk to the police" video, explaining that not even congress know how many different crimes/laws are on the books?
Explaining how easy it is to charge a random person with a crime and get a conviction based on just ill reflection of their character?
Can you draw the logical connection between lack of privacy and how easy it makes it to charge random people arbitrarily? How this could be used for political gain, profit or to supress dissent?
I can definitely see how a lack of privacy can be used against you. But I'm just saying it's correlative or causative. i.e you can be fairly transparent with a group, and still be relatively free with that group. The privacy isn't what leads to that freedom, it is trust.
At the government level, that is possibly non-existent. But I think it's important to remember that it's trust (or not needing trust) that is the driver of freedom, not other factors.
Trust is cool, but it's a system designed for friends and family. Can you trust 300 million people with you internet banking password? It's statistically inevitable that some or them are dumb, evil, crazy, or all of the above.
"isn't really an argument for/against privacy... it's an argument for reform."
I don't think its possible to reduce laws to such an extent, lawyers can't know all the laws in the same way developers can't know all the code, and you can't fit all the code of a modern computer into something manageable. Every country I know of is in a similar situation.
Basically thats why we have warrants for search, right to silence and make dragnets illegal.
Also world without privacy is a world where anyone can impersonate you and commit fraud, and anyone can sue you, and even if they loose, financially ruin you.
But there is a balance where if we view trust as the key, and privacy as the ability to control trust. Then we can come up with solutions that may compromise privacy to some degree but maintain trust. (I don't know what they are, I'm speaking in the rather useless abstract).
More we might miss some good solutions if we are blindly protecting privacy (which is the natural knee jerk I end up with)
False.
Correct is: privacy as a concept already existed in the Ancient era. It is one of the younger human rights, it gained wide-spread adoption in society/culture and accompanying recognition in law about 200 to 100 years ago.
The expectation of privacy has always been when traditionally not under the eyes of others. We've always had this in villages where kids sneak away from supervision.
Small closed groups feature bullying or enable serious abusers fairly often. Misjudging kids or mistreating them, domestic violence, guys beating weaker guys were just fact of life in villages.
I am unsurprised that the Minneapolis public school system deploys Gaggle while New York private schools implement no-screen policies.
Children have a right to privacy.
It doesn’t help that foreign states are probably working to purposely inhibit or even disable American society as a community function. (See news about Russian state companies and Facebook manipulation from more recent news)
Privacy is important, but public safety has a higher priority.
The biggest risk is abuse of the data, not the basic mission of these monitoring services
Do we have any evidence that Gaggle-like services reduce bullying?
I also respectfully disagree. I'm a sincere egoist, so I say that: no, public safety is not a "higher priority" than _my_ rights, nor is it of a higher priority than any individuals' rights.
I think the solution to bullying, and generally the unwelcome encroachment of others into our spaces, is some ability to rebuke the interlocutors' access to our space entirely, permanently, and even prematurely. You'll notice that the goal of surveillance is antithetical to this, entirely; I take it to mean that the possibility of bullying is endemic to surveillance. You can not have surevillance without the opportunity for gross abuses.
Don't get me wrong, I do care for public safety and the collective well-being. But that is because I choose to care, because I choose to sacrifice of my means and materials in the times and places that I find necessary. The goal should not be, that we allow people their freedoms except where it is inconvenient to the collective purpose. The goal should be, to empower upright and moral citizens to understand their innate ability to make the world better.
Yes, this is an imperfect solution to the collective well-being. There will often be times where such individuals do not understand or accept their privilege to enrich the world of themselves; and, at the end of the cultural moment when the cards are dealt and the pot is dealt, we might find that such an approach is utterly immeritous toward the goal of preserving our common heritage. If this should happen, then that will be a great tragedy indeed; yet it won't be so great by half as the tragedy of even a single human being denied the full fruit and art of living with their full power.
EDIT: Also, I'd like to draw a line between privacy and anonymity. Privacy means I ought to have a space where nobody can exfiltrate resources from. This does not enable bullying, because bullying requires some degree of interconnection, whereas privacy must be specifically preserved where intercomnectivity is the state of business. Anonymity, I grant you, does allow bullying (to the degree that anonymity allows you to interconnect while refusing to allow other parties to identify you.) I will entertain conversations about the dangers of anonymity, because I think there is a happy middle between "don't track me" and "interact with me as a known quantity."
Surveillance is antithetical to both privacy and anonymity. To the degree it is antithetical to privacy, I will fight it tooth and nail, and forever condemn the sniveling ne'er-do-wells that think themselves privileged in _my_ spaces.
Isn't the problem with this position that you cannot reach "universal rights" if you approach from individual self-interest. What if my particular circumstances mean that I don't want everyone to have Right X? I see egoism and universal rights as incompatible. Perhaps I look at it the wrong way.
> I think the solution to bullying, and generally the unwelcome encroachment of others into our spaces, is some ability to rebuke the interlocutors' access to our space entirely, permanently, and even prematurely.
This doesn't handle the very real threat of Grooming, or unrecognised bullying. Children will tolerate quite a lot before they even realise it's not healthy.
I am a strong proponent of privacy, but I don't see an easy solution to children online. It shouldn't be black box, as they can easily end up on the wrong side of the internet. But it equally should not be a white box.
>Children have a right to privacy.
I can't agree with this. I'm a staunch privacy advocate by normal millennial standards(by HN standards I'm probably middle of the road for the privacy concerned group) But certainly privacy is a privilege, maybe one you get de facto at some point, somewhat akin to voting, but obviously in certain situations people lose their privacy rights. In an extreme situation you could look at a prisoner, but also consider that we allow people to be monitored at work - and we have legal methods of removing privacy as well - a search warrant for example, or sexual predator lists.
>Computers are nothing less and nothing more than an amplification system for the mind.
The same could be said about automobiles being an amplification system for the legs, but you have to get a license to drive one because of the destruction that they can cause.
It is likewise with a computer; people here, of all places, should understand how destructive a computer can be. Look at how people are polluting their minds with misinformation and divisiveness on social media, or in more extreme cases, doing things like using bot nets to DDoS websites. Children don't have enough understanding of the world to be given privacy. If a toddler locks themselves in the bathroom, you shouldn't have to respect their privacy if you think they have gotten into the medicine cabinet, you open the door.
I think the whole concept of remote administered tests is ludicrous, a physical presence with a proctor is the minimum standard for a trustworthy results that's not 1:1 video chatting for the entire duration(and even that can be gamed to some extent). To me it makes absolute sense in a competitive academic environment like a school to have keyloggers and network IP monitoring if you want any semblance of fairness. Make kids use a certain, monitored machine for schoolwork. Otherwise those who can afford to and/or have the propensity will cheat. Unless of course you're fine with academic achievement being an even stronger proxy for class.
I'm not saying kids can't have privacy mind you, and especially not that we should give up privacy entirely. But I don't think that kids should have a right to privacy with regards to their education.
We are training kids that someone is always watching. That they have to censor their thoughts and hold in their feelings rather than talk about them with others for fear of it being determined to be 'wrong'. How many of these kids will be suspended, expelled, medicated, etc for things that were harmless? I think this surveillance will cause these kids to be less independent and delay their maturation because it's safer to do what you're told, not explore questions you have, and suppress your opinions.
The number of conversations I had in school that would have gotten me I'm trouble today would be a lot. I would guess they would have expelled me for some of it, even though it was totally harmless.
Where is the cost benefit analysis? Or is this just another 'common sense' solution because 'think of the children'?
This is because our current rules were designed for a world with worse enforcement. Take, for example, the speed limit and ticket costs. Both the speed limit and price of a ticket for breaking the speed limit were set for a world of imperfect enforcement. We assume someone who is pulled over for speeding was probably speeding many times before they were pulled over, so we have the penalty set relatively high. The penalty was not designed to be given every time someone goes 2 MPH over the speed limit.
We really need to rethink the rules if we drastically change enforcement.
It's a _limit_, not the speed at which you have to go. Just go 5 MPH under the limit and you'll be fine. Of course if you always are on the edge there will be moments when you go over the edge, but that's on you.
> Both the speed limit and price of a ticket for breaking the speed limit were set for a world of imperfect enforcement.
I don't have a strong argument against the price of a ticket being set higher because of all this, it does make some sense. But the speed limit isn't lower than it should because we didn't use to catch every fast driver.
It's low because, as drivers tend to forget, they are not alone around the roads and the security of pedestrian (and mostly _children_), cyclists etc. requires, among other things, low speed.
That's actually how they set some limits. They know that people go over the limit by a specific amount when doing traffic studies and will adjust the speed limit below the safe speed they want. They just dropped a 50mph zone to 40mph because they had too many people doing 60mph in it, which was associated with more accidents at one intersection. Now everyone does 50mph in the 40mph zone. This area did not have pedestrian or cyclist safety incidents driving this change. Getting hit at 40mph vs 50mph isnt going to make much difference to them.
"It's a _limit_, not the speed at which you have to go. Just go 5 MPH under the limit and you'll be fine."
I agree, but the topic is about enforcement. This example is a perfect illustration of how lackadaisical enforcement can influence society's views on the subject and lead to perverse system design, compliance, and enforcement.
That said, I agree with the sentiment that some penalties and rules do not make sense. Even the people who run the system know it. It's just that they get to use law enforcement or prosecutorial discretion to decide who to punish and who to let go. Which I believe fundamentally undermines the rule of law and leads to biased enforcement. I guess that's one good thing about the automated system - it treats everyone the same.
take that away and they'll make mistakes as adults with more serious consequences
Having such a reaction to something so minor is a problem.
Another one was me kicking an exit door of a school when a friend was deliberately holding the exit door closed.
Looking back, the punishments felt arbitrary based on some random factor that I didn’t understand as a kid. Throwing a binder meant monetary compensation (described by the principal). Kicking the door didn’t have a definitive reason, but I assumed general “rambunctiousness” was to blame.
Maybe I’m passing the buck here, but I didn’t completely understand the result of my actions, and felt, as an adult, was an obvious opportunity to teach a kid something enlightening but instead just got passed to my parents who were happy to punish me without context. I’m 38
One of my children chucked their school laptop out of their bedroom window which then landed on concrete fifty feet below. The display was shattered, so I emailed the school and informed them that the laptop had been dropped and damaged, and can we order a replacement. They let us know the replacement cost, and we picked up the new laptop a few weeks later but were never billed for the expense :)
Swearing is one of those things that ranges from not being a problem to being a big problem. Kids using words because they are forbidden is not a problem. A kid swearing in front of teachers to signal disrespect is something that needs to be addressed. A child swearing at another child in anger, then it may be necessary to unwind what's going on and that may determine if harsh consequences are necessary. While I have never heard of a child being suspended/expelled over swearing, yet if it did happen it was probably due to something else going on.
Part of the problem with this surveillance is, at best, we can flag conversations that correlate with certain outcomes. Things like understanding context and motivation take discourse, yet understanding context and motivation are essential when considering a course of action.
(Of course the other part of the problem are the privacy implications, which is horrific if even a tiny fraction of what the article claims is true.)
… because an early understanding of the educational system might lead to incorrect voting later in life, with potentially serious consequences for said system's tax revenues.
I really wish I had internet sooner just for the comfort.
You say it like they didnt get everyone to gather around and film them while they did dumb shit in the hope that it would 'go viral' on tik tok and make them into the next meme.
This isn’t entirely new. Without context you could be describing many religions.
The problem I have is the internet was wild when I grew up and it was the place to escape life. Now the internet is worse than real life and real life has been reduced to staying at home because of covid (your experience varies greatly by geo location).
Tor, freenet and other networks that are actively hostile to the majority of users now feel like how the www felt in 1997. Here's hoping that their inherent nonmonetizability keeps them from going down the same path.
Regarding your question, this is an example of people choosing to do something because they can and not because they should. In fact, the surveillance is likely a violation of the 4th Amendment of the US Bill of Rights.
I should add that I think elementary school is valuable for children, as most of that is social and it's with the same teacher and fellow students for most of the day. Digital surveillance starts in middle school and high school, which is when students are old enough to start self-directed learning.
It's worth thinking about how many parents would have to pull their children out of school due to concerns over privacy invasion before the school system decided to change its policy or tech stack.
This probably goes down better in religious societies. It used to be that this "someone" was an amorphous deity. A child was constantly told they are under the watchful eye of someone-up-there.
Now it's the outsourced, underpaid Creepy Joe from this week's surveillance technology company.
I mean, who didnt share or look at some porn when they were 10 years old? Would it be worth it for a whole army of teachers and consultants to descend on you and file an “incident report” and a “follow up” and “de brief” for this? What a colossal waste of resources and money. The $300k for the software could be better spent elsewhere.
And yes, one suicide was apparently prevented, but then here we are again at the same argument, its like the one in the current apple/child porn case.
Should we all get monitored just because of one positive but disproportionately small outcome?
Outcome of this is whenever we see her someone else drives, so maybe it's just a long con to save her money on gas.
This seems like it needs to be fixed with legislation. Make it illegal to track others' location without their explicit consent (hopefully this is already the case, now that I think about it), and also make it illegal for anything whatsoever to be conditional on giving that consent (e.g., make it illegal to tell your kids "I'm only helping to pay for your college tuition, or letting you drive my car, if you install Life360").
You are a mini-tyrant in training. Thinking the world's problems can all be fixed by making something illegal. Encouraging the government to interfere in intra-family relations. Never actually thinking about how any of these policies would play out. Insanity.
He is tyranically fighting parental tyrany? How ironic.
For every happy hamily I know one that's fucked up. Once you are 18, you are free to escape abusive parents, and that often means you loose their financial support. Sometimes thats what you have to do
You are 100% correct that a person ought to be entirely independent upon reaching adulthood, if he/she so chooses. You know how you do it? "Mom, Dad, I'm not going to play by your rules any more, thanks but no thanks, I'm going to make my own way out there in the world." How successful are you going to be as an independent person if you don't have the balls to make a simple statement like that, if instead of declaring independence, your only means of resolving this conflict is by calling the cops and sending your parents to jail because they "abused" you by asking you to install some app?
Parenting is not all about money. Some parents have a very specific and tyrannical idea of how their kids 'should' turn out, and will not hesitate to spend money, beatings or literal blackmail to achieve it.
Think of a wealthy father that beats his daughter because her behaviour is 'improper', or forces daughter/son into marriage. Or of Eton College which is stupidly elite and expensive, yet famous for beatings. This stuff is common enough that I've witnessed some of it, and it's not pretty.
I am not claiming the proposal on offer here would be of any help, just trying to clarify the issue
With all due respect, you've gone way, way out on a tangent that has nothing to do with the original statement or my initial reply.
What else can we make illegal? How about a parent requiring their kid to eat broccoli. How about demanding the kid maintain a C-average before joining a sports team. Let's also make it illegal for a parent to ask the kid to do some basic chores before playing video games. Surely you have some more ideas while we're at it...
Plenty of countries going to college and moving out of home are different events that happen at different times.
Same with Asian (Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, China, Japan) universities as well. I believe Europe is similar.
The "move away for college" is very much a US piece of culture.
If we want college students to have the rights and freedoms of adults, then they need the means to support themselves.
It came out of kink. Communication and consent in that case is rather important since the difference between rape and battery and a fun night is rather thin. For some getting a toilet brushed vigorously stirred in their privates is a good time for most it isn't.
Trying to apply that to normal people is not only bizarre but actively harmful. A much better one is harm minimization, everything people do is bad for them, we just want to make it the least bad it can be.
When you start using that lens pretty much all our laws which deal with children are there to make adults feel better and nothing to do with actually protecting children. E.g. sexting is the safest way to have sex. It is also the only way to have sex that two 12 year olds will be arrested and put on the sex offender registry for.
We had Contracts for thousands of years, they are a form of concent in exchange for something.
Without concent, you have no rights.
The pinephone and similar are great for anyone under 12, and hopefully will get more usable soon.
You know what is also great for anyone under 12... not having a smartphone.
There are other ways of preventing suicide, homicide, overdoses, rape, etc, which don't violate privacy, security, etc.
If we’ve literally made tragedy impossible, there’s no way we haven’t traded away a disproportionate amount of freedom to get there.
This is really going to sound dumb, but this kind of creeping surveillance is the biggest reason I hope we can make self-sufficient off-planet colonies. I honestly believe that the trend toward complete surveillance and control in the name of complete safety is irreversible, and the only way to escape it is to literally move to where they cannot physically reach you.
I’m not sure there is gain in normalizing this.
One friend's dad had playboy magazines. Another had videos. And another had games where if you knew the password (we did) it would show some 8 bit graphics with nudity.
It wasn't about sexual arousal. It was just about curiosity. Hell, my 6 year old tries to see my butt all the time. Because it's my butt and it's usually covered.
We, as neighborshood kids, had a stash in the woods of pornos we stole from family.
Personally, I think it’s best to avoid porn completely.
Pre-puberty, probably not, no interest for obvious reasons. Pre-internet, absolutely. Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, etc were prevalent. BBS's existed too.
Anyway, what I was trying to say was, pre-internet it kinda required post-puberty hormones to be motivated enough to clear the hurdles to accessing porn.
Also, to another commenter’s point, the porn I was able to access was amazingly innocent by comparison to what is probably commonly available now.
BBS's entirely predate the Internet's general availability (although of course the Internet is older than most people realize).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
They kinda melded a little at the end of the BBS era and the beginning of the public internet era with integrated email and whatnot and you can still get to some via telnet, but they were distinct entities / networks / protocols from the internet.
I do remember a Playboy when it came out in 1971. The Willy Rey issue (girl on the stock certificate). Nice looking.
Not only were Playboys pretty rare, but they were a different kettle of fish than any modern adult images/video.
Are times better or worse? I couldn't tell you. Lots of differences. Many women never have children. Divorce is common. People aren't raised on farms with all the attendant physical realities of life. Slavery was common in most societies. People got married at young ages. Sex has been secretive or not depending on the era.
Probably the worst thing about porn is a scarring of the mind, sex as non-participatory act, exotica as normal, staring at screens, addictive behavior, the internet as a net negative.
If schools and governments wanted to help prevent suicides, the answer isn't difficult. You try to improve social security, and otherwise make an effort to foster safe environments.
Stranger monitoring everything you do and might punish you for it... is exactly the opposite.
Me.
After a few emails back and forth, I sent one in demanding to see a search warrant and to know what horrible behavior the school believed gave them the right to search my computer. About 10 minutes later the spyware was removed from my son's school Chrome account and I got a call from the school system CIO who was making extra-sure I wasn't going to take further legal action.
It is really important that parents be willing to stand up for our children's rights. They don't know better, and they don't have the money. And yes, as a parent, it's worth spending money on.
This is nuts. Even in countries that are quite authoritarian politically there's way less policing of boring daily life. You are living in a ridiculous police state.
"Or even"? Aren't guards the much much "lighter", more reasonable option? Guards usually just sit there watching the CCTV (often dicking around on their phone instead), they don't have the same ability to wield state-sanctioned violence that the police has.
Buried in the school usage guide/hand-out is a paragraph that states that the school reserves the right to enable the microphone and camera at any time, with no warning or notice required by the school faculty.
It’s ridiculous and I’m not sure I can do anything about it.
A piece of tape over the camera would solve about half of the problem, and is just a good idea in general.
If you want to be a bit more paranoid, set up a separate network for the school-issued devices, and turn those networks off except during school hours.
Or, if you're looking for a social solution, print out thay paragraph, take it to the next meeting of the school board, and demand to know why they want to record your child while they're getting out of the shower. These devices will be in children's bedrooms the majority of the time, and if they can record at any time, with no warning, they will record images that would be considered by many to be very illegal.
yep, this is the solution...
"why do you need the option to record my kids?"
They probably don't have a good answer, and the parents will want to know.
It’s more about fighting the ridiculous policy, which shouldn’t be a thing.
A few years ago there were cases of cameras being enabled by faculty who observed teenagers in their bedrooms, doing something or another, I can't remember if there were salacious details (nudity, sex?) involved - but it was a scandal at the time. Now it's normal?
You're thinking of WebcamGate from 2010. It resulted in a civil case, and the FBI and US Attorney Office investigated, but they declined to proceed with any criminal charges. The school district had 66,000 images from students webcams.
Make sure every single parent and child knows about this paragraph. And the name of every individual that put it there. At every school meeting, ask them why that paragraph is buried, instead of prominently displayed on the laptop itself. Ask them to install cameras in their homes, controlled by you.
> You're just trying really hard to come up with excuses of not trying and to just sit back and let it happen. It's pretty disgusting.
That's definitely not my goal.
I absolutely hate the mandatory use of laptops and such below high school level. I think our local district is starting it in 5th or 6th grade. Granted the school also whitelists what snacks are allowed, down to what brand of chips, and completely disallows things like meat and cheese...
You almost certainly "consented" by checking "I agree" to the ToS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_Scho...
Seperation of work/school time and device with personal. They should use their school device for school stuff and when they finish their work for the day, power it off and move to their personal life.
Not only does this stop the surveillance, it also brings to light the issue and those who may be abusing it.
The road to a totalitarian state is probably paved with this kind of save the kids shit.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history
That being said, I am grateful that I escaped school before the administration properly got a hold of computers. I went to a good school, so I doubt it would be hugely Orwellian, but the point stands - kids need separation.
Actually, coming from Czech Republic, this was the norm when the communist party was still in power - it was clear that you had to say different things (or rather, not to say certain things) in public from what you could talk about with family and close trusted friends.
Children have been taught this from young age, resulting in adults being to do this compartmentalization almost automatically. No wonder, it was a survival skill basically - you never know who could be an informant or just opportunist to use any anti-party things you say against you for personal gain.
Its actually quite interesting to see people who don't come from this background and actually say what they really think in the public! ;-)
Hyperbole is rarely conducive to productive discussion.
What tyranny? What domesticated kids? You are living in a weird world where everything would be a slippery slope, if you truly believe this. You might need some help here.
Even outside of lockdowns, helicopter parenting seemed like a big problem.
At the least, these supporting comments make me think that HN groupthink has slipped so far into a fantasy world full of hyperbole that no meaningful conversation can be had. Either your kids are in a cult or you are in a cult. I can only feel sorry for you folks.
FWIW, I have 2 kids and they have a very healthy life with school, sports and time to play with their friends.
Helicopter parenting is not related to the top level comment at all.
(Unless you think schoolmates are friends, in which case I have news for you...)
In your mind, this person you're disagreeing with isn't simply mistaken. They "need help".
This type of rhetoric is against HN guidelines. It's also exacerbating the issue and the feelings this individual might have about "tyranny".
It seems to be quite obvious that the lack of personal space would cause or exacerbate the mental issues. However, the modern society tends to ignore the problems that cannot be easily tracked or assigned a metric.
I'll never have an open mic installed in my house (alexa, google etc...)
Yet it seems the generation of young engineers that built these things sees nothing wrong with them. Why? Maybe, because they had helicopter parents and were chaperoned and supervised 100% of the time during their childhoods.
They have grown to see surveillance as inherently benign, because during their entire childhood they were surveiled by well meaning adults.
Of course the email and chat apps had prominent "Your messages may be monitored, including by your teachers" notifications, right? Kids weren't misled into thinking their private conversations were private, right?
Law enforcement can point a gun at you to evaluate your psychiatric level and kill you if deemed to high
That's how users of RAT* software are treated - what makes this different? A legal notice they hid as best they could? Currently, that might make it legal, but morally it makes no difference.
But I didn't suggest a prominent notice because that makes it better (though it does - if I were spied on, I'd want to know). I suggested it because that would make the victims of surveillance fight it. You can't rebell against what you don't know about.
Mentor: "Hi! This is your mentor. We've noticed that you're suicidal, depressed, paranoid and generally not doing that well."
Student: "How do you know that?"
Mentor: "Oh, we've been monitoring everything you chat about with your friends and family. So we basically know all your secrets, if you've chatted about them in the past 1.5 years."
Student: shoots herself.
When I was younger I spent a lot of my time advocating for privacy, informing people of how bad the state of surveillance was, how bad it would be in the future, and what we could do to improve things. Eventually this turned out to be very bad for my mental health, because I not only realized most people didn't give a shit, but also that no matter what I did, I had no power to improve things by what felt like a even single epsilon.
With the advances we're making in hardware and machine learning, I think we are setting ourselves up for future disasters that we have barely begun to imagine - our entire society's communications and thoughts are owned by everyone except ourselves, and our ability to analyze, predict, and censor the populace with this extreme centralization of power and data is currently being scaled up even more by every tech/ad/communications corporation (and government) in the world.
I still try to do what I can, but it feels like I'm able to do less and less with each passing year; I am constantly forced to use products and services that do terrible things with the data they collect on me, yet it is increasingly becoming something outside of my control. Perhaps this makes it obvious why normal people rarely try to use privacy-preserving software and practices: they recognize how difficult and hopeless the endeavor is, and they'd rather not dedicate their lives to such an impossible feat such as communicating privately with their friends and family. The only things I can really hope for here is that we get an actual data protection law or basic consumer bill of rights in countries like the US, but I don't see this happening any time soon.
I also predict that the general populace will recognize the vast importance of this issue in the future (whether that is +5 or +30 years, I have no clue), but likely only after some very terrible events occur (it would seem the current state of advertisements, data breaches, mass surveillance, and censorship is nowhere near what it will take). This comment turned out to be more negative and hopeless than I had wanted, so I'll add that I also donated to the EFF - they seem to be pretty principled and helpful in this area, and they also sent me a cool T-shirt. I'm fortunate that I'm able to use software like Signal/IRC/Matrix with my close friends, but I wish that everyone else could be given the right of private self-expression and communiucation as well.
Sadly, no. They begin long before someone is born. A decade ago, Target was discussing how they could identify that someone was pregnant, and start targeting ads to them. Plus, the art of making it not look like they were doing this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
I'm a bit late to the "... yeah, the tech industry has turned evil!" bandwagon, but am actively moving away from most of it lately. I've gotten rid of my Apple stuff (or am moving away from the rest), won't run Win11, colo a server to host stuff, have been moving to Matrix, etc. It's a bit of a pain, certainly, but I've also been perfectly willing to go with a "If I can't come up with a sane way to do it, it's not worth doing" attitude towards that which I can't do.
More to your point, though, the walled garden isn't purely in apple's realm, kindle fire has the same sort of restrictive app store, with no option to adultify it.
And having society acknowledge that everyone is hurtling to an end and that, therefore, thoughts and ideas and feelings might just be more important than whatever the current dichotomy of opinion is - well, having society acknowledge that would be nice, i suppose.
Apple doesn't want to be in the news because 5000 children saw a bare ass, and that's their shareholders' perspective. I think.
No. You have a choice. Don’t use Facebook. Don’t tweet. Don’t post comments on Hacker News. Shop in local stores. Pay cash.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies
This situation may prevail, but not through me.
To be clear, I don't advocate for a perspective of complete helplessness, there are a lot of things I do to reduce surveillance and tracking of myself. But I cannot have privacy be the sole criterion for living my life, because it would, simply put, result in a terrible life.
How about that story with the local pizza shop digital ad board that had hidden cameras recording people and performing facial recognition without their knowledge (https://www.bitcoininsider.org/article/1241/norwegian-pizza-...). Now it's becoming mainstream "loyalty" (spy) tech: https://retailtouchpoints.com/features/news-briefs/caliburge....
I strongly agree with you that upholding privacy is not a personal choice, but a societal one. Any attempts to suggest otherwise is blaming the victim.
At least we can still vote.
At it stands every single incentive for businesses points toward maximizing surveillance. Product design, marketing, advertising, direct monetization of data, validating business models to investors, everything is helped by more data. The push for data is relentless and the appetite is endless.
Consumers largely don’t understand or don’t care. They talk shit about it but they don’t change their buying decisions.
Nobody is going to seriously try unless people are willing to pay for it in significant numbers. I don’t see that. Most people just don’t care or don’t understand.
There is also quite a bit of surface area to defend if you are trying to make privacy guarding OSes or browsers. Look at how hard it is to eliminate browser fingerprinting. There are so many ways to infer unique information.
"...that monitors students’ school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts."
This is activity within an account that was intended for school use, or possibly, on a school issued computer. There should be an expectation of some level of lack of privacy within those areas.
If they want privacy from the school, use an account or computer the school didn't give them. Yes, some people may not have the resources to get their own. But that doesn't mean the school has to let them do anything they want on the the resource that the did give them.
If I were a student, this means Chrome would slurp my entire (PERSONAL!) browsing history into Google, and by extent- Gaggle.
In fact, my former school district actually used Gaggle. I know this for two reasons- first, the IT manager said "oh and we get Gaggle alerts for things you do on your Google account" as a sidenote when giving the onboarding speech that no one listens to. Also, I got a warning a few times in my email for people saying dumb shit in large shared documents (yes, it flags _your_ account just for being in a docshare with people who write things that trigger the system).
If there was a little notice on documents, emails, and chats that said "${service} monitors your usage on behalf of ${schoolDistrict}" or even just required you to agree to Gaggle's TOS I might have a different opinion, but it seems as though it was perhaps intentionally obscured.
I know I said things like "ugh I have so much homework this weekend, kill me" to my friends in the hallways and in class, with the lockdown killing all those conversations and moving them online I can't imagine my parents getting an email every time I said something like that.
tl;dr these are kids- don't normalize this, please.
I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my employer used something like this to detect "security policy violations," etc. even though I keep my personal life off of my work laptop.
And to be transparent I’m pretty much ready to homeschool my kids. My kids are actually in this district.
Sounds like a great (after-school) opportunity to teach kids how to combat a surveillance state. An education they'll use when they're adults, imagine that!
Why do we just accept that porn is being peddled to 10 year olds?
I don’t know if Gaggle is the right approach but they’re at least attempting to help our kids while most of Silicon Valley is just trying to monetize them.
Stepping on our rights, invading our privacy, forcing us to do various things that we would rather not do - to protect us - for our health - for the public welfare.
They need to change their tune. This one is getting really really old. Like at least 80 years old. Maybe older.