Gaggle Drops LGBTQ Keywords from Student Surveillance Tool
the74million.org
the74million.org
My kids' school gave every student a Chromebook upon return to in-person school, and the result thus far has been massive amounts of distraction as half the class winds up on YouTube or something instead of getting work done. I wish they'd ditch them entirely, but the school went all-in on Teams.
Worse, I can't put my own parental controls on it. Any devices of ours our kids use have strict ScreenTime limitations on hours of use, total amount of use in a day, which programs can be used at all, which sites can be reached—meanwhile, the school devices have few restrictions and they can reach all kind of garbage sites on them, and I can't tighten that down.
I did try that already with Google's router (we have Fiber) but of course it doesn't have mac-level blocking. I could swear it used to, but if it did, it doesn't now.
Not that it makes it any better, it actually makes it worse because it illustrates the lengths they're going to invade kids' privacy and mine their data.
If they catch us with a mobile phone on the trading floor, it's reported to compliance.
Why are school allowing kids to have youtube during class, they could at least firewall it like companies do.
(for the record, I'd rather they just ditch the tech entirely until at least high school, but if they're gonna have it, they probably ought to have YouTube access or else it's far less useful. I'm also not sure why schools started letting kids carry phones to class, what a fucking terrible idea)
If you own the device you could of course install the required root certificates to interfere with HTTPS traffic, but arguably that's more intrusive, and a massive security hole if you make a mistake (like Lenovo did, for example).
That does explain who the target audience for Chromebooks is though. Most tech illiterate adults seem to prefer Windows or Mac for their own machine, in my experience.
Administrators lose their jobs and may get personally sued. Teachers may get sued. The district may get sued.
Neither approach will make everyone happy, but erring on the side of too much surveillance carries a much lower likelihood of ending administrators' careers or bankrupting a school district, than too little. Of course they do the thing that we, collectively, strongly encourage them to do. It's not "entitlement", it's a rational response to insane expectations.
> With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there.
I assure you, teachers, at least, perceive no such pedestal. Quite the opposite.
I was listening to a 90s era George Carlin show on a long car ride recently and during a bit about the nation's budding obsession with child safety, he said something I found kinda poignant in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis (n.b. predates the pandemic by a lot): "we've sucked all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives." Amid all the discussions of the apparent relationship between helicopter parents and neurotic, depressed kids, I think it's pretty reasonable to consider whether the sum total of "dangerous fun" deaths/ruined lives - lawn darts, pellet guns, fireworks, pedo van, tall swingsets, etc - exceeds the harm inflicted by that bubble-wrap outlook on life. I'd argue probably not.
While reading tfa, I had the same thought regarding the company's claim of suicides prevented. Even if you take it at face value (which I don't; like, come on, there's no way they've demonstrated that with any degree of rigor), is the tradeoff worthwhile? I'd argue probably not, but don't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't get me called a monster at a school board meeting.
Reduced influence of the church + much better medical understanding and vaccination for a lot of the infant killers as well as increased affluence has caused people to start having children later which already cuts off a whole chunk of offspring and fewer.
Some simple changes just off the top of my head:
- the students have a way of reporting, e.g., bullying. And it is only the information (messages and names) related to the report that the school now gets accessed to.
- the school then acts on the information provided to them.
It’s not reasonable for parents or others to expect the school to stop anything hateful from ever happening. But it is reasonable to expect them to do something about it after it’s been brought to their attention.
"But they'll just do this on other forms of chat that the school can't monitor!" Yes, they will, but the school won't face multimillion dollar lawsuits over that.
I also imagine that one lawsuit like this will set a precedent, and then there will either be multi-million dollar settlements, or people will decide that children should not be placed in a panopticon.
But either way, this counter argument is based on the implicit assumption that the school should be providing an “official” system through which the students should talk to each other. Get rid of that, and problem solved. Have an official channel for parent-student, parent-teacher. And let the students talk amongst themselves the way they wish.
Does that ever work? What's the school going to do, launch an investigation and put kids into interrogations to figure out if it's true? Send in undercover students to confirm the bullying? And then what, expel the bullies and deal with lawsuits from the parents? Schools have every incentive to look the other way, and unsurprisingly, they usually do.
And for students there's zero incentive to even report it. It's like living next to a known criminal and the police saying "tell us if you ever see something strange". Nobody is going to, because they understand that it's just lip service and the police isn't going to do anything, but they'll still have to live next to the criminal when he finds out someone has spoken to the police.
Explaining to students that if they bully someone, they're increasing the likelihood of that person one day bringing a pump gun to school and murdering them is a much better deterrent than any "you can report it and we totally will take that seriously and do something" campaign.
Please please tell me you don’t work with kids or ever open your mouth anywhere near kids. The unintended consequences of your “advice” are beyond horrific.
The GP comment suggests that:
1. As an effective deterrent to bullying
We explain
2. To students
That
3. “if they bully someone, they're increasing the likelihood of that person one day bringing a pump gun to school and murdering them”
And they seem to have overlooked quite a few concepts in putting forward this proposal.
For example —
The alleged perpetrators of any such pump shotgun massacre would be amongst the audience of people receiving this message.
And
The audience are students, not professors of logic or Bayesian mathematicians or any other category of audience.
And more. Good night.
I don’t really understand where you’ve coming from. Either the school is supposed to act on information it receives to stop anti-social behaviour, or it’s not.
I certainly don’t believe that the school should do nothing, and I believe that most people agree with me.
If they are supposed to do something, then I don’t have a specific course of action since it’ll be situational. But I do know, that the correct response is not “do nothing”.
> there’s zero incentive for students to even report it.
That’s only because the school isn’t doing anything to address what complains they do get.
It's not about what it should do, it's about what it's going to do. The way the system is set up, they won't do anything unless something drastic happens (extreme violence) or they get press coverage for it. And then they'll set up some program to teach kids not to bully. Naturally, kids bully because they haven't been told not to.
None of this surveillance does anything useful. They are just looking for offenses they can apply their zero-tolerance policies to.
Hence my second point which I’ll restate as “actually do something about what the incidence that you already know about”.
The high school two of my sons go to has all kinds of crap that they have install on their mandatory smartphone. If you don't do it then so sorry, no school for you. Which is pretty weird because the law here says that children should be given an education, it doesn't specify anything about the mandatory use of all kinds of tech for which perfectly good paper equivalents exist.
All I see as the end result of this is utter unaccountability, zero effect on the things it supposedly is for and finally if the tools are used at all it is to the schools advantage (and the pupils and parents' disadvantage), such as ad-hoc reschedulings. I'd love for my kids to have paper agendas and just their books for high school, this phone+laptop combo just adds to the weight they already have to lug around (which is insanse, if my travel bag were that heavy I'd never travel), is super fragile, expensive and best of all forcefully ties them into the Microsoft applications + eco system, something they really can do without.
Eg they were bullying or bullied and complaints about the bullying were raised but were not dealt with. Preemptive monitoring not required.
Or we find “concerns were raised” about behaviour, often many times, over many years, and the concerns were ignored.
Anyone translating such things into a need for more pervasive monitoring is just pushing their own agenda.
Where is that?
Surveillance aside, teachers where I'm at are overworked and powerless. When I was a kid in Europe, teachers were gods. Woe be to child whose teachers say is misbehaving or being lazy or not paying attention. 35 years later and in Canada, teachers are... Beat,really. Angry entitled parents and angry entitled public and rules and policies and complete lack of any freedom to make a difference.
I do not see North America placing teachers on moral pedestal.
Sometimes I get the impression that college administers think they're running the world's fanciest high school.
Yes, college students are adults and are entitled to all of the privacy protection of adults. I don't consider children to have the same right to privacy—although here too it depends on the age, high school is very different from elementary school.
yep. I'm used to these exposés being for college programs but most of the drama has shifted to highschool and middle school these days. I don't know if that's progress or companies finding softer targets to sell their software to.
One sizable group wants them to do Z, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing X.
And so on, and etc, because people are just emoting and parroting their script.
What is the problem that one wants to solve? What are the guiding principles determining that it is a problem, that it needs a solution, and which are used to evaluate the potential solutions?
That? That's too much work, and it's hard.
So we fall into primate screeching because we haven't, actually, bothered to think.
Is this not malware by any definition? Protect the children, prosecute these fuckwits.
The existence of tools and companies like this is pitiful, corrosive to our democracy and clear evidence that education, governance and society has generally lost its way.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/eliminating-harm...
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...
The overuse and inappropriate use of physical access systems has turned many public places like schools and hospitals into high security prisons.
Sadly that's just one technology in a growing list aggressively pushed onto institutions through a cocktail of fear-mongering, insane regulation, cost-cutting efficiency (getting rid of actual guards and supervisors) - all part of the ever expanding security-industrial racket.
In my opinion, a very important talk is given by Eve Ensler on "the right to be insecure" [1]. The only other hacker I've seen pick up on her refreshing stance is Bruce Schneier.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_what_security_means_to_...
By default, the Internet is rated X. That's just a fact. Mainstream platforms pull any material that's explicitly pornographic, but there is a delay, and children will be exposerd to adult content.
LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography. If the software is confident it can distinguish between the very different meanings of "lesbian" vis-a-vis content, then great. But I don't believe that for a second.
I have a child who is regularly exposed to terrible things online. It's like playing whack-a-mole. Schools are one of the big chinks in the armor. I can't control what she's exposed to there.
If I couldn't afford private school, I couldn't even chose what school she went to. I'd be stuck with whatever policies the local public school has.
We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.
Anything else will lead to problems in later life (overconsumption of porn for example).
It might be as simple as connecting to the neighbor's open WiFi, the local McDonalds public WiFi, or their best friend's mobile data plan or their unrestricted home WiFi.
There are HTTP proxies operating via port 80/443, full with an app just like a VPN. I've seen a 10 year old kid use a free SSH shell account (via port 80) to proxy their traffic. There was another kid who just used a public cloud provider's free tier and had a full desktop environment running there, accessed via some web VNC interface - that one was 12 y/o though.
Regardless, you're just putting off the inevitable - and then it will be like a whole new overwhelmingly fascinating world has just opened, which is not great for a young mind not yet fully capable of moderation because you didn't allow them to practice it.
> I also don’t give my daughter admin access
Kids can boot Linux from USB too.
I also place restrictions on types of media. For example, she loves listening to techno-pop music, but that’s not allowed a less than an hour before bedtime. So there’s a de facto “no music an hour before bed rule.”
Kids YouTube is treated like a very low quality tv service. She gets a certain amount of “video time” but I allow more time if she uses an established steaming service (Netflix, etc).
She’s allowed to see content creates adults pretty freely. She can also talk to her friends pretty freely.
I am very restrictive when it comes to communicating with unknown “children” online. Kids social media platforms attract predators. Some predators are grownups, some are toxic other kids.
Ik actually much more worried about “child” content than “adult” content.
Filtering only works on domains. But most content these days in on a handful of forums (FB, etc).
I require her to preserve her browsing history. I review it if I feel there’s a reason to (she’s not good at being sneaky),
We don’t talk about the content, because she mostly just listens to techo-pop and plays browser games.
If it seems she’s hanging out in a toxic forum, I’ll discuss it with her, but also be firm about blocking it.
Understand, I’m most worried about making sure my daughter gets her homework done, does some reading, and gets a good night sleep. The internets main threat is as a distraction from that.
But she just wants to watch anime and listen to techno pop.
She understand iPhone, iPads, and streaming.
We’ve talked about this, and doesn’t like listening to music unless there’s an AI choosing the next track.
It’s actually kind of terrifying.
Of course, I never needed any of those techniques at home. My parents made it clear they trusted me and that I'd have their help if I found myself in a bad situation online. I learned self-policing early. Very handy skill.
So at least at home, it's pretty easy to win the cat and mouse game as a technical person if you wanted to. At places like schools, the IT guy probably doesn't really care so is easy to "defeat" (mine knew we played cracked copies of counterstrike and starcraft off the network drive and never did anything about it).
She just doesn’t care enough :(
Kids have their own interests.
She’d rather draw and paint than figure out a way for to reset BIOS.
Edit: All she’d have to do is spoof the MAC address.
I accept that you have a right to parent any way you want, but I cannot possibly see how this benefits anyone, least of all your kids
Parents should have classes, and resources to help them be good parents. And bad parents should be at best made aware, and at worst ridiculed for their bad parenting decisions.
There are still a sizable number of American parents that think spanking their kids is okay. This is something that most of the modern world has completely moved away from and criminalized. So yeah, not everything should be ok.
I filter at the router level because that’s the most effective way to filter. I think that’s a best practice.
I deny her root access because she has and would install anything the Internet asks her to install. She’s a kid!
Where do you think I’m crossing a line?
It's concerning that you only think "what if my child sees lesbian porn" and not "what if my child is blocked from learning about their own identity".
How about if the parent says “in my culture the dad is the first sexual partner of the daughter”? How about then? (And yes. This is a real thing)
So no if a parent says oh my kid can’t be lesbian or gay or whatever, they’re just wrong and should be called out. The same way we call out for physical violence, we should call out for mental violence.
Either way I'm not interested in your pro-authoritarian beliefs.
The problem with this is there is even less agreement on mental violence then on physical. There are a lot of people who believe a reasonably explicit sex-ed curriculum is mental violence against children.
So you'll respect the child while disrespecting the parent? But don't recognize the hypocrisy. You're on the slippery slope. Be careful. Be very very careful. The fall can be painful.
The state should be involved in regulating very powerful tools that allow someone to dig in and shape the communication and information available to others. “Big brother” needs to be stopped whether it is a nation or an overbearing parent.
You're taking these children out of context, putting them on an island, and then too strongly suggesting you know better than their parents. Links to that precedent please.
Parents have no right. Kids do. And you're the arbitrator? Yes, sorry, there's plenty of hypocrisy in that scenario.
Sure, there's a slippery slope -- in the direction of authoritarian parental control, which results in parents imprisoning their children within a controlling and insular community to keep them indoctrinated and obedient -- all for the sake of "protecting" them from viewpoints that might one day cause them to think for themselves.
That's how the society works.
All this backseat patenting is not a good look. Unless a legal line is crossed, you do not and cannot know what is best for someone else's child. If you believe otherwise, you ironically probably aren't fit to parent.
This is how liberty and freedom works currently, at least in the USA.
Children are, and have always been, raised in a society. They are not your personal slaves to lock in a closet and isolate from the world.
Our social contract protects the rights of individuals. You can't claim to be in favor of liberty while denying it to someone else.
You're approaching a very nuanced subject with a very black and white view. Parenting is hard, and marred by our own experiences. In addition, every kid is different in maturity, emotional intelligence, ways of processing information, etc. The person who knows them best and who is trying to do the best they can for them probably has a better idea than you do here.
There are certainly parents right now who feel like strangers shouldn't be teaching kids about Black history and are trying to remove such education from curricula.
How much needs to be censored because some identities were politicized by people who don't like them?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+it+like+to+be+a+lesb...
[2] https://advocatesforyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ITI...
[3] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/dcf/SHP/Brochures/I_THINK_I_MI...
[4] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/les...
But relying a search engine to filter inappropriate content isn’t very wise.
Also really bad stuff appears in Kids YouTube. It gets taken down fast, but that doesn’t seem to stop it.
Google takes it down, but it pops back up.
This is a gross exaggeration.
> LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography.
The "LGBTQ = sexualized content" dog whistle is so tiresome.
> We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.
The vast majority of children are in danger from family members and friends of the family. "Stranger danger" by and large isn't a thing.
Your kid can see whatever they want at most public libraries. Most libraries don’t censor internet connections.
Constant surveillance and a lack of trust by authority figures is something far more concerning and damaging than seeing a naked person.
I’m worried about toxic content: there’s really, really toxic stuff on children’s social media.
Stuff telling kids they’re stupid if they don’t get straight As, they’re ugly if they don’t look like super models, and will die of starvation if they don’t get into a FAANG.
Every type of toxicity you find on adult social media exists on children’s social media.
That’s what worried me.
Don't worry, the "think of the children" line of rhetoric has already invaded library systems, and books are getting banned and libraries are shutting down[1][2][3][4][5].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-01-27/school-lib...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/10/lgbtq-...
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/north-dakota-considering-ba...
[4] https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor...
I feel like there is way, way worse stuff on the internet than at any public library I've been in. Is this not the case?
Literally have these parents been teens before? Did y’all have a puritan upbringing where you didn’t learn about sex or watch porn until 18? If you did, do you consider yourself a healthy adult with a reasonable relationship with sex?
Othering of LGBTQIA+ people does real harm, to which you seem to be either ignorant or indifferent.
Are you dogfooding the software?
If not this is all just rank speculation.
One of my kids' first exposure to hardcore pornography was in second grade on the personal iPhone of an older kid.
"Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops."
This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this. Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.
This appears to be what happened. Google and microsoft figured out how to exploit children for money by forcing them to use their shitty products in place of actual classroom education. I agree with you, I wouldn't want my school in a computer centric education, let-alone a heavily monitored one. It sounds like what you'd expect in a juvenile prison
You might have to move if you want to escape this, and you'll never really know if/when a school or district implements these surveillance programs, either.
> Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.
That's because it is. The Stasi/KGB/etc couldn't have dreamed of the capabilities authorities have today to surveil everyone at a massive scale to find even the smallest of their infractions.
Which words were you previously supposed to use for these cases?
[EDIT] And, presumably, teachers would ignore the flagging if you'd used the words in, say, a school assignment, for a good reason.
[EDIT2] I'm not complaining about the downvotes, but, could someone please explain WTF? I truly have no clue.
You made a post in a culture war thread. You could post the most benign thing ever and people will find a way to be upset by it.
Another band aid tech solution to a social problem
I presume in the age of smartphones, the average teenager probably knows more than I do about minority sexual identities and practices.
If I became a 14 year old tomorrow I'd probably find it so shocking and foreign.
I wouldn't necessarily call it shocking or foreign, but more like a highly specific subculture, which in some ways it is, but it has, because of its very nature, the potential to become the dominate culture or evolve into the dominate culture with time. I suppose this is where the "stranger in their own land" phrase lies, and with it "adapt or die."
Seeing what's in our public schools today is a comedy of cringe and highly manufactured, on par with the 60s hippie culture.
It's truly a shame.
The nonsense that comes out of kids mouths on these discord chats when they are gaming - both written and spoken - is just... childish.
They use words and phrases they don't understand, they push the boundaries and get carried away. Like kids are supposed to.
But out of context these things could easily be used to 'cancel' them when these kids are older.
I don’t quite see why dragnet surveillance and exposing queer kids to additional risk and abuse can’t be bad at the same time.
Scrap that.
The real question is why those surveillance tools are acceptable in our society and in addition: why aren't the makers aren't in jail yet.
Although there are a lot of cases where things like this, or exactly this, have happened, many of them are recent.
follow up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807843 School District Agrees to Pay $600K For Using School Laptops to Spy on Students
In the fist article you linked, one of the comments that hit me the most was by m3dFlatLander about a documentary about a similar event:
> To be fair to the school shown in that particular documentary, they weren't looking at the students through a webcam. It looks like they're using a remote desktop program to look at the students desktop. He explained that many students use the webcam program as a mirror to look at themselves or just mess around.
Link to the parent comment for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134224
Yes, and LMS such as Canvas