Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance

pluralistic.net

171 pointsColinWright80 comments

The fact that they got the sensors removed isn't even really a victory, as noted. They'll be back, eventually. And the way the usage is being monitored is only one part of the issue here.

The original issue remains: the people at the desks are seen as cattle to be more efficiently packed, undeserving of their own space. That's not a mindset that goes away. I've seen it in assigned desks -> shared first-come-first-served seating. I've twice worked at places where my office was surreptitiously packed up and moved while I was in a meeting. When they show you how they think of you, you have to understand that they'll never change how they think. They'll just remember not to show you.

> the people at the desks are seen as cattle to be more efficiently packed

Absolutely. It's so dehumanizing. It boggles my mind that they think they have the right to do things like this, it betrays a lack of basic respect for other humans that's hard to articulate.

We must discuss this pathology. What is the origin of this mindset? How do these businesses and institutions start thinking like this? Treating people as inhuman resources to be efficiently allocated and managed as they see fit, and any method used to do so is justified?

I mean, I understand it even though I don't agree with it. If you're trying to budget for an organization, and it comes down to either needing to buy an entire new office building, or making everyone make do with 20% less space, that packing people in option looks pretty attractive.

Before COVID threw everything into disarray, a friend was telling me they had at least one building that was really bursting at the seams for space. I don't think they did any automated usage monitoring but they did manually check utilization on a regular basis and asked people who weren't using their assigned desk frequently enough to give up their permanent seat. Which seems very reasonable.

More people, commoditization of tech workers, more dependence on a consumption-heavy lifestyle, less local sense of community, real estate costs growing disproportionately, in combination with the mandate to cut expenses that was always there.

"Inhuman Resources" would be a badass title for a movie about a company that hired vampires and stuff.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1857842/

I think they wasted it by not having actual monsters or aliens.

The origin dates to antiquity, slavery has existed a long time. I'm sure there are accounting books from ancient Egypt documenting all of this in intricate detail.

The fact that this mindset continues to persist is horrifying, but it's been a constant battle for thousands of years... I don't even know how you fight it without at least the concept of unions and solidarity between workers.

I feel it is the lingering desire of people who once had kingly power over their employees to at least retain the certain knowledge that rules do not apply to them in the same way they apply to their employees.

I doubt that provost is interested in moving to the night shift so that they can more efficiently use their office for three provosts in three separate shifts. They aren't even contemplating that the rules they want to apply to everyone in a low social class might be more productively applied to themselves.

Because I am pretty sure you could fit five grad student desks in a typical provost's office. Fifteen if you force them to work in three shifts. Of course five grad student stipends is almost certainly also only half the provost's salary... seems like another opportunity for cost savings and improved research efficiency.

Wow. I would resign on the spot if that happened to me.

The one time I worked in an office (in my 25 year career), someone tried something similar but much less egregious. A person I had never met before came up to my desk in the middle of the day with a new employee and asked if they could swap desks with me, so that this new employee could be nearer to their team mates. Since the desk they wanted me to move to was all the way across the floor I pointed out that this would leave me sitting far away from my own team mates and thus it would not exactly be a net improvement. It took a few tries, but eventually they understood that I was declining to move, and it never went any further than that. I was rather surprised that they didn’t even consider that they might be making an ineffectual decision.

For me, the real dehumanizing aspect is the one-sided and covert rewriting of the workplace rules. They could easily get the same information they want by having people sign in, or reserve space in time increments (although I'm not really sure how this lab works in terms of allocating space.) In that case everyone knows what data is recorded and its level of detail.

Yea, that would be a big part of it. All cooperation in a group comes from understanding and agreeing to that group’s rules, and traditionally from having some say in what those rules are.

But there is also the lack of respect for personal privacy, personal belongings, etc shown by moving someone else’s stuff. And to cowardly wait until someone is in a meeting to move their office, rather than risk a confrontation? Wow.

You know, there is a story in Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, about how office assignments are handled in large, successful software companies. The team that needs offices is sent by their manager to whoever is in charge of the facilities. There they learn about the various office buildings they have, the floor plans of the rooms that are available, what furniture is readily to hand, and so on. Together the team picks one or more offices, furnishes them, etc. To me that almost sounds like a myth from a long–lost golden age.

But working from home has lots of advantages too, so I’m going to keep doing that rather than try to join IBM or whatever.

Reminds me of reading about Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle (by IDEO and Adams) from 2001. It was a design exercise in fostering individual customization of a person's cubicle while fitting within the standard form/ business requirements. I'd post a link but most of them have been lost to posterity (even IDEO's :( ), so here is an image search...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ideo+dilbert%27s+ultimate+cubicle&...

I sure fantasized about it.

> I would resign on the spot if that happened to me.

Part of the problem in the article's instance is, this isn't just a job for them: it's their degree. If they "resigned" now, it would be abandoning their degree program partway through, and while they could probably transfer in some credits at another institution, they'd surely lose some time.

And I guarantee you not all of them have the money to be able to afford that loss.

I’m talking about having someone move my office while I was in a meeting.

The ridiculously low pay that PHD students accept is another problem entirely.

> The original issue remains: the people at the desks are seen as cattle to be more efficiently packed, undeserving of their own space.

Not just that, if I read the article correctly the administration wants to free up lab space so they can move in themselves!

> Luzzi explained to students that he didn't need IRB approval for his sensors because they weren't "monitoring people." A student countered, what was being monitored, "if not people?" Luzzi replied that he was monitoring "heat sources."

An actual human adult said that with a straight face?

Maybe he was a Predator in an earlier life? :)

Debatable: The human part.

> He accused the students of "feeling emotion"

This discussion makes a good point about how surveillance is deployed into society, first targeting prisoners and refugees, then low-level wage workers. For example, I wonder how these grad students would react if they were subjected to the Amazon warehouse surveillance system:

> "...how the distance assistant works: green circles surround workers if they maintain six feet of distance. If workers get too close to each other, the circles light up red."

> "...Drivers for Amazon, many of whom are third-party contractors driving Amazon vans, learned earlier this year that their vans would start to feature a four-part camera with biometric feedback indicators."

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-amazon-monitors-employee...

I was writing a response to this, the point of which was going to be that there's a gradient with regard to the amount of respect shown (or not shown) to people as they climb the social ladder, but at the same time, there are some forms of surveillance which by nature _can't_ be so selective in who's targeted. Now I'm not sure that's true.

My argument was going to center around common places where surveillance happens - engagement tracking at grocery stores, license plate readers on traffic light cameras, and the like. It's hard to opt out of roads or grocery stores. But then I realized that even these reflect the gradient. Maybe big box stores like Walmart are deploying these technologies - are white-collar workers actually shopping there, or are they instead going to smaller, boutique-y shops who don't install them? Are traffic light cameras going into upper-class suburban settings, or are they first being deployed to major roads and arteries?

So... I've more or less proved my initial thought wrong - this gradient does indeed persist, because people at higher rungs of the ladder are self-selecting for experiences which don't feature these kinds of surveillance (even if that is not their primary reason for doing so).

I feel like when the surveillance is set up within an organization (prison, school, company) it's done in order to enhance the power imbalance rather than enforce any particular behavior.

I'm glad these "listening sessions" actually resulted in anything positive. From my experience the "listening" at these meetings rarely results in action. I was in the final stretch of my phd when the administration decided to "reorganize" my department by splitting it up so they could take part of it and combine it with two other departments into a fancy "school" that they could use as a selling point. We had multiple "listening sessions" where we explained that maybe disbanding our interdisciplinary department wasn't a good idea. Guess what happened? They did exactly what they wanted and the professors I worked with are now spread to the four winds in different departments and some have left. But they got some multimillionaire to donate some money to put his name on the new school so they got what they wanted. Luckily, I got my degree before the changes went into effect.

The official non-microblog source appears to be:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sens...

The official microblog source appears to be:

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109128406324931625

The interesting graphical view in this submission looks like it is more intended for content like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26459603

Ah, thank you.

As always, some people hate the graphical layout, but if you want to read the discussion on Twitter, I find that there is no method that compares with it.

Here's the Twitter discussion:

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1578145220369084416.svg

Zoom out and see the shape of the entire conversation, scroll around to see the individual comments, click on a box to go to the original tweet.

The original submission here is to the discussion on Mastodon, though there have been no replies there yet.

this would be lovely as html

I've asked many, many times to try to get people to help me learn enough to be able to do this in HTML. They've all expressed enthusiasm, then gradually faded away and been unable to do it. There are complexities that most people find sufficiently daunting that they decide it's too much trouble.

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy".

That's why I've settled (so far)on a clickable SVG. Pareto's Principle: 80% of the benefit from 20% of the work.

There is a lot to be said for just running dot and living with the imperfections.

Which is exactly what I do.

If you have the energy for one more go - I’ll help out with the HTML. I’ll try the email in your profile.

Sure ... my time is severely limited at the moment as an event I'm running is fast approaching, but I'd be happy to talk about the context and the problems, and see if we can do something.

Edit: BTW ... plausibly the problem is working with me!

presumably something like python is being used to scrape tweets, then spitting out svg tags? shouldn't be much work to change those to html tags with a linked stylesheet or js library for diagrams. I see help offered elsewhere but count me as a +1, seems like a really useful tool

You don't have contact details in your profile, but I have in mine. Shoot me an email and I'll explain more about the challenges. If you can help I'd be really interested in talking with you.

email sent

That's awesome! I find it funny I've never thought to graph a Twitter conversation before...but I suppose that would require thinking about Twitter. Which I avoid.

Simple discussions are easy to follow, but complex and extensive discussion are really, really hard to follow. Charting them like this is the only way I know where you can trace over discussions and make sure you catch everything.

I get involved in a lot of large discussions, and extracting and distilling the knowledge is important to me, which I why I start with the chart, then have tools to navigate over it, cull the useless bits, and retain what's important.

If you cultivate and curate your connections, Twitter can be a brilliant source, but the interface is atrocious.

I clearly don't think what the administration did here is good. But I don't exactly align with the students, either. Thought experiment: let's go back to the days when we always had hardwired desktop computers at every desk. Their locations and network addresses are known. Usage is logged locally and centrally, e.g. in Active Directory. Would logging require IRB approval? Once the logs were collected, would running a report on the logs to show how much usage each workstation was getting, and by whom, require IRB approval? It doesn't really seem like a science experiment to me, just logistics. (And I think the "we're not doing science here" issue was not understood or handled in good faith by the students. Technically, any time someone says "Hmm, I wonder...let me check something...aha!" is science.) But I also acknowledge that there are situations where you would need to err on the side of treating it like an experiment even if there is doubt.

The rules (laws, really) on this are actually pretty clear.

You can collect a lot of data for internal “operational”. A hospital could track surgical infections to see if an Operating Room needs decontamination or someone needs retraining. Likewise, the AD logs are fair game for sysadmin or admin purposes.

However, you need IRB approval for “research activities” that are meant to draw generalizable conclusions that extend beyond the immediate situation. How do cleaning schedules, in general, affect surgical outcomes? Do more logins lead to better student outcomes? The IRB can retroactively authorize you to look at operational data for that, or to collect new data, or even add in (some) perturbations.

Hmm... I'm still confused but that could be me. I would put the desk monitoring under the former category.

Is this a decent example?

Operational: We analyzed the performance logs on Tony's computer to show that he didn't use his CPU that much and thus could be given a cheaper model.

Research: we used those same logs, and everybody else's, to show that most people use about 25% of their CPU capacity.

It’s definitely not a bright line, which is why you’re supposed to talk to the IRB.

In your example, I think it depends on the audience and goal. If you’re using these data to plan a computer lab upgrade, it seems very clearly operational. If you wanted to publish a study entitled “Factors affecting IT utilization at an R1 university”, you probably need to run it by the IRB. In that case, they will almost certainly give you the go-ahead after reminding you not to include any identifiable information.

One difference is intent. The computer logging was somewhat incidental (but not entirely benign, so we shouldn't give it a pass without thinking), while the heat sensors are there very deliberately.

The other difference is territoriality. The students very acutely (and accurately) perceived the sensors as intruders in their space. This may be a crude animal instinct, but it's there for a reason. Permit one intrusion, and more will follow.

I assume IRB approval would not be needed if the school was just using computer logs to verify that school policy is being followed.

Regarding the "we are not doing science here"... there is a lot of ambiguity with the use of the word "we" which students may have been instinctively reacting to. "We" is generally an inclusive term, and the students probably felt insulted that the administrator was dragging them into the mess by suggesting the students were part of the process, when they were not. However the students may have misunderstood the intentions in the administrator's use of "we" and maybe he was referring to an entirely different group of people.

If I were a student or parent of one of the students I'd start making some calls to find out if any approvals were made for the under desk surveillance of students. Although from a liability perspective the onus is on any of the faculty at the school that fail to report a whiff of a Title IX violation.

This is in my opinion why you're better off as a graduate student, than a graduate worker, as some people want to become. When I was a graduate student I wasn't employed by the university, so they had no say in what I did with my time. You don’t need worker protections if you avoid being a worker in the first place!

Usually the worker portion comes from either TAing or RAing. In these cases you would most definitely be a worker.

You don’t have FICA deducted.

Yes you do (by default), same as any other worker. At least that's what it said on my tax forms and pay stubs.

Ok then not social security

Wrong again. I was classed as ordinary employee and had SS deductions just like any other job I've had.

Ok well that was definitely not the case for my TA stipend.

A similar story unfolded at my university? [1,2]. Initially deployed as "scanners" instead of cameras. Similar to this story at Northeastern the board argued they needed to be able to assess room occupancy. With the cameras now disabled they increased the counting done by humans, who now just walk into the classrooms (they used to avoid doing so). I suppose they can later argue the cameras are less annoying and a computer counting would actually be more privacy friendly than a human. Without evaluating the necessity of the counting in the first place. A question also raised in the article.

[1] https://www.mareonline.nl/en/news/report-on-cameragate-confi... [2] https://unseeusleiden.noblogs.org/

I worked at a medical clinic that was looking to do something similar. When the COO found out I was a Raspberry PI hobbyist, he approached me to find out if his plan was possible. What he wanted to do was to put IR sensors in all the medical exam rooms, so he could determine usage, without impacting patient privacy. This was technically quite easy to do, but not something that went forward, mostly due to too many other projects.

This same COO later became the head of a private school...

I’m the student who wrote the twitter thread. Let me know if you have any questions!

Here's a chart of the discussion on Twitter:

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1578145220369084416.svg

Useful to see if you've missed any comments that you'd like to reply to.

Thanks!

I just want to thank you. We need more people like you in the world. This sort of obscene surveillance should be illegal.

Thank you! Keep in mind this was a joint effort by many, many students. I just happened to tweet about it first.

Thanks to your colleagues as well. It couldn't have been easy to stand up to them.

Props to you and your fellow students for being the professionals in the room (along with a few of the professors.)

Thank you! Our faculty allies were very helpful as well, although in a more private way.

Have you tried finding allies in the faculty on this issue? I strongly reccomend you find a handful who share your concerns and leverage them to get this madness resolved.

Sharing desks is hard, I'm curious if they are trying to use COVID WFH policy to justify over-accepting students, hoping the schedules just magically work out. Fun fact, they wont. No amount of metrics will stop two people wanting the same desk at the same time, if allowed. Or am I mistaken? Why else would monitoring desk usage be on the table (excuse the pun)? Surely they aren't trying to use these figures in evaluating a students work, right?

I think it's pretty sad that Northeastern spent so much money building a fancy new science center, which is mostly unusable covered space, and now there aren't enough desks.

We have some excellent faculty allies. The admin is interested in doing the same thing to faculty (making them share space) and so faculty is 100% on our side. Hence we had a public letter with 250+ signatures including many faculty.

I agree they likely over-accepted and spent money poorly but I can't say for certain, as I'm not in admin and thus not privy to these details.

University administration is destroying higher education. So much graft and waste - rather than cutting down on administrative bloat, the solution is always to cut resources from those doing useful productive work.

I once had a job developing strategy for one of the top business schools in the world in its revenue center. In this best-of-the best setting, there was little incompetence but lots of mediocrity. At university administrations, as you drift away from elite schools and drift away from revenue centers, in my observation incompetence becomes common. Administrators are in those roles, because they’d be fired from any high-performing workplace. We can see this play out clearly in the fast-declining high-ed market landscape.

I lasted about two years before it became unbearable.

Proud of the students at NEU who standup to this bullshit. This kind of thing always gives me hope for the next generation

What is the point of surveillance of grad students? I guess I don't get the value regardless of the intent.

From what I understood, the point was to monitor how often grad students use their desks so they could move to time-sharing and the university could reduce costs.

Guess it's a more dystopian version of open offices :P

> "They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students"

I'm not sure about how to combat heat sensors under current workplace law. But, some workplaces have cameras, which as far as I can tell break surveillance law in many states. Especially given the ability to reconstruct a transcript of what was said and keyboard input from the video.

No patience for this shit. Uninformed placement of sensors in your desk/workspace feels like a pretty disgusting move. I like the account, I hope itll inspire a harsher response where other workers have surveilance foisted on them

Really sounds to me like all those flimsy excuses are just fabrications to obfuscate an ulterior motive behind the sensors. It's very sinister and dishonest, like the person authorizing their usage and answering questions about that decision either doesn't fully understand why they're doing what they're doing, has no regard for the ethical issues involved with invasive surveillance as well as no concern for misuse of resources, or hiding something. Perhaps all of the above.

Ah yes universities, the one place you can treat customers paying you loads of cash like shit.

seems like it would've been easier for the school to have a single well placed camera and some light ML than all of these sensors

EDIT: content seems to be updated to point at https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sens... which is readable.