School surveillance of students via laptops may do more harm than good | Hacker News Reader

School surveillance of students via laptops may do more harm than good

theconversation.com

Dad of 5 here. Monitoring of equip can be reasonable. Request the equip be returned periodically for reset & restore.

Monitoring minors - on school property - beyond temporary measures that are strictly necessary to address recurring, meaningfully disruptive issues is not okay.

Monitoring of minors off school property is a hard no, by strong default.

This is where we start.

I think schools would say that distance learning during school hours falls is reasonable.

Anyone know if you sign into your kids school account on a personal chromebook if that is monitored? This is only for gmail, meet etc.. I imagine the search queries are logged if they use the school account. The login account for the chromebook itself is not a school one.

Chromebooks must be enrolled under Chrome Education in order to be recognised as 'school property' and therefore become controlled and monitored by schools. Signing in with a school account will not enable these extra features.

However, signing into Chrome on any computer (Chromebook or not) will send search results into the Google Account's search history, which, if the Google Account is a school one, is monitorable by IT to see search history and browsing history etc.

Two thoughts

- wtf really, is this happening? are there no privacy laws in the USA?

- a big OH RLY on doing more harm than good

Children have very few rights in a school setting. It's a serious constitutional problem.

These are devices handed out by the school. They shouldn't be using them for anything other than school. We have a rule in my house - all school-issued devices must stay closed and in the backpack unless they are being used for school work.

But we are "rich". Low income households don't have alternate devices for non-school work. And these devices "work" like real laptops and tablets, so it's very tempting to use them for non-school activities.

If you want to help, make more of your web sites work well on low-spec smartphones. In the US, the primary device for a low-income household is a smartphone.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/22/digital-div...

> If you want to help, make more of your web sites work well on low-spec smartphones.

Oh my, this. If a web app entry form is a little laggy on that brand new iPhone, then it's going to take like half a minute to render on a five year old discount smartphone. Most developers have snazzy machines and many rarely stop and think about how it's going to run on the lowest end devices likely to use the software.

It's so annoying. It's not like we don't have tools to test this stuff either. Heck, most devs have an old phone hanging out in a drawer somewhere. Most just don't take the effort.

Yes but web devs have an apparent need to load a bazillion of the latest js scripts to display a wall of text on their site. Its atrocious and a massive waste of energy, bandwidth, and computational power

> wtf really, is this happening? are there no privacy laws in the USA?

There are privacy laws in the US (both federally and in the states), they aren't, however, optimally adapted to the circumstances at issue (moreover, the actual practices may not align with the law; having a law does not itself automatically cause behavior to conform.)

>In Baltimore, where the public school system uses the GoGuardian surveillance app, police officers are sent to children’s homes when the system detects students typing keywords related to self-harm.

When this happens, what happens when a cowboy cop shows up, the parents argue with him, he starts ordering people to "GET ON THE GROUND NOW!" in their own homes and ends up shooting people. I guarantee this will happen and the cop will probably face no prosecution because of self regulation of police departments and qualified immunity. Seriously, at what point is it time to flee the US?

Same thing that happens now, except with more computers triggering cop-person contacts

If you monitor everything but still require exams, you’re doing something wrong.

It's not the same thing as school monitoring but I imagine that many tech companies with offerings to youths are going to start pushing the responsibility of safety and liability to the parents, such as by giving parents control of chat accounts. Whether by school or parents, the future is one where kids are going to be watched.

Only an idiot bueracrat trying to cover their ass and reduce liability would be stupid enough to think it could do any good. The Zero Tolerance "we have to be stupid, and suspend students for getting assaulted and get ourselves sued because otherwise we could get sued!" logic.

It would be fairly easy for students to overwhelm their overlords with their "AI" software and reduce any gathered information to meaninglessness.

My Phones dying, I'm crying and depressed, gonna end it all and throw it off a bridge, snatch a new one, don't be glum.

"AI" that.

The AI doesn't care about being right , and the cops love getting free Probable Cause on anyone they want.

Why on earth are they doing this and how could anyone think it would do any good at all? And how could it possibly be legal?

"may"??

Oh, the land of the Free.

No shit - person that once was a child

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