Governments Harm Children’s Rights in Online Learning | Hacker News Reader

Governments Harm Children’s Rights in Online Learning

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Still much better than being locked up in a prison. There's absolutely no privacy at all at the school building.

You're not wrong, BUT: I believe that taking biometric photos of kids and storing them in badly secured online databases is a lot worse than teachers seeing the kids with their eye. Digital data remains usable forever, and that means it needs to be protected from theft and abuse forever. But nobody's going to pay for that. So collecting the data is a sure way to doxx those kids in the long term.

There are cameras with facial recognition at the school I went to. I'd much rather supply a semi-fake photo (so the teachers don't bitch about me not having a face there) to Google than step anywhere near that building ever again.

Schools store children data in unsecured databases anyways, that's really nothing new. I trust a cloud service much more than the school IT admin. The cloud service at least has to fix stuff when a problem is uncovered, the school admin will just get you a detention and carry on.

Fortunately this is many years ago for me, but today's reality for my siblings...

Oh wow. My school didn't have any cameras inside the building. And even if there are security cameras on the entrance, they overwrite after 3x24hours. Plus they are not connected to the internet.

It seems we have a very different experience to base our opinions on.

Well, my school is the kind of school where a child recorded a teacher abusing another child and the solution was to ban mobile phones...

And when a child (unsuccessfully) knifed a teacher, all the other teachers went and started telling every parent that their children will have problems if they tell the press that the attacked teacher was abusive, saying things like "this is our internal problem to solve, no need to involve the authorities" (but of course they were more than happy to involve the authorities in the attack, they just didn't want them to know the full story).

The problem is, the fact that there are a few great schools doesn't mean there isn't a ton of really bad schools. You can't base policy on the great schools alone... I'm absolutely convinced that distant/online education is a huge net positive. Canceling it instead of improving it feels so wrong.

> Canceling it instead of improving it feels so wrong.

I don't see anybody calling for edtech to be cancelled, but something less extreme like not sharing data with 200 adtech companies or removing the 7 SDKs that share real time location data from the education version of Minecraft to Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc is probably a good place to start with the improvements.

Yeah but this is resolved with installing a Pi-hole or Ublock into browser; yes, teens can do that and those who care about privacy do it. The rest has already spewed their data all around the internet anyways.

Why care about protecting the kids from Google and Facebook etc when they have Youtube and Facebook running in the other browser tab? Why not protect them from actual physical threats they can't do anything about by themselves instead?

You can't do shit about being forced to go to a school building - don't go and the police will come to force you to go (tested that for you).

> I don't see anybody calling for edtech to be cancelled

But that's the practical outcome - here they said "oh we have these unresolvable problems [...list of bullshit...] with this internet stuff, I guess we need kids back in the prison!". And articles like this are just feeding them more.

> here they said "oh we have these unresolvable problems..."

Sorry, who said they were unresolvable?

The government office responsible for education based on feedback from schools, whose administrators read articles similar to this one (some points from these other well-known articles were recited word by word, basically).

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