Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?
"Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it."
I worry that our school system is now made up of teachers and support staff who are still absurdly undervalued and trying really hard to give our kids a good education but then a whole layer of management above them who have lost the plot.
See the discussion in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37594179
Apathy as others have mentioned. Apathy because people are tired. And maybe apathy because it's clearly being aimed at people for class and/or ethnicity. People tolerate a lot of bad if doesn't affect them in particular.
People need to push back on this sort of thing - if they don't, it just steamrolls forward.
I'm not sure I see the problem with schools getting an update that a kid was arrested by police or that their family is on food aid or something. Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over the summer.
The existence of such a system just seems dystopian.
Seems entirely reasonable that issues of domestic violence should be known to schools, but this goes way beyond that.
It's only a matter of time before more public institutions manufacture reasons to use the same system. Surely the NIH should know about your police interactions before treating you.
https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/5972-insight-bris...
"Accessing Out of Work benefits" is saying the child may be at risk. "Teenage Parent" is used as an indicator.
> For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone [1]
David Cameron was rightly criticized for those comments in 2015. Unfortunately there's been a bit of a culture shift since then, and it's now often those same critics supporting similar measures and implying that you must have something to hide if you fear them
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/13/counter-terr...
What's wrong with just asking the parents?
Gather together a big pile of food and let the kids know where it is with instructions to only take what they need for the next couple of days or so. Why go to the bother of sending the food out, when the kids are already there. Also, the parents/carers may feel insulted if they are thought to be receiving "charity", so it'd be a better idea to allow the kids to obtain extra food without involving the rest of the family.
Nevertheless, the organisation of services to provide free food to selected kids at home and at school requires a database to record which kids. Such a database is also accessible to schools for obvious reasons.
If you have the very HN-y opinion that being on a database is so bad it would be better if the kids stayed hungry that's fine, but please at least make a token attempt to understand a system before dismissing it.
Quite the opposite - my view is that if someone is hungry, then they should be provided food as a basic function of human society. To be honest, I've never heard of this food delivery system from UK schools and I thought that the issue was mainly handled (poorly in my view) by having Food Banks for starving families.
Can you point me to some information on this UK scheme please?
If you want to argue it sounds like a mess and would be better as a broad social security scheme I'm not going to disagree (though limiting numbers on it does save governments money...), but either way, it's going to need names and addresses on a database to make it work.
Not having kids myself, I didn't realise that teachers were so involved in providing food. I'd definitely go along with delegating food provision to a different group other than teachers (dinner ladies?). I suppose my concern is tying together multiple data sources when it should not be necessary to look at police records when deciding to give out food vouchers.
So… why delivery and why a list?
I realize this is a US perspective, but this actually sets off more alarm bells in my head than a school overreaching by installing spyware. The latter can be addressed by direct parental action pretty easily. Government agencies systematically sharing data is a lot harder to solve and if anything is more dangerous.
Just because a family gets welfare aid from one agency doesn't automatically mean that they want their kid's school to know about it. Maybe they got enough and want their child to not have to feel different from the other kids by getting special treatment at school. Why not just let the family self-report their need to the school?
More alarming is the idea of reporting interactions with police. A conviction is one thing, but an arrest could very easily be a mistake, and propagating that information explicitly in the name of child protection is a recipe for turning that mistake into a tragedy when a school overreacts.
But if CPS doesn't get kids reported, they don't get money.
They don't want to fix this by taking better care of kids (“generational squeeze” on public finances, as the article puts it), so they must find other solutions. And the solutions they're going with are simple: get everyone to report everything on kids, in a format that can be easily used in court.
In 6 months, expect a message that a teacher got beaten up for, probably unknowingly, causing a kid to be forcibly placed into "care".
Fighting against this type of data sharing on principle will probably fail because there are some legitimate use cases to Keep the Children Safe for this type of data.
It'll be hard, however, to push back a request that all data access requests are logged with justifications because, after all it helps to Keep the Children Safe.
You might also discover that the appetite for this data might wane entirely if they can't access it without being monitored and without having to justify themselves.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
I assume they would argue public interest … “protect the children” is the blanket public interest clause that allows all sorts of evil behavior.
Where is that being insisted? Also, what is the bar for "poorly"? After all, were talking about the government, which does many things poorly despite massive budgets, extensive power, etc.
An extreme example is nuclear weapons. You can win any single battle with nuclear weapons. But the world will end. Probably better to slog through trenches, and do the job “poorly”.
Labeling kids based of family situation will indelibly make their situations define them. Many kids living in dysfunction go to school as a refuge from their life. School administrators aren’t social workers, and aren’t in a position to provide psychological and social assistance to kids who need it. A lack of funding for those services doesn’t mean you offload the work to functionaries at the local school. Teachers aren’t trained in these areas either - their forte is education and no matter how much you liked your home room teacher, they weren’t trained in social intervention. But there’s another aspect, around that idea of escape - once you’ve labeled everyone according to their situation, when you walk in the room, you have to assume everyone knows. You can’t let your life at home disappear any more. And not everyone who has access to the information will use it in a caring unbiased way. Many people will see a kid who has various labels of dysfunction associated with them as broken, needing special education, judge outbursts or misbehavior more harshly than an unlabeled kid.
Finally, the entire point outlined in the article was to use information about their situation to flag unknown problems. Just because someone is on social welfare or a family member has a mental health issue, or even a parent is in prison, doesn’t mean they’re being sexually abused or whatever. However by labeling them administrators are explicitly intended to use the label to assume a likelihood of previously unreported abuse.
Many parents are accused falsely of abuse or neglect for normal childhood injuries. They go through the trials of the damned to get their kids back and fend off criminal charges, and criminal charges are indelible on your record and show up in background checks even if you’re found innocent.
So - yes, mass surveillance would likely catch more criminals. But it will also criminalize everyone, and punish many that are innocent. It’s better to disarm and slog through the trenches - and maybe actually fund social workers rather than surveillance startups - than descend into this morass.
We don't insist they do the job poorly. Instead, we set things up so that they need to cover their own ... asses when they take action. Instead of making a rational decision on a per situation basis, we get things like "0 tolerance" rules; so that the authority figure can say "I was just following the rules". Because if they make a judgement call, SOMEONE will flip out and they'll get fired. And that leads to all kinds of horrible outcomes
- Child brings a plastic knife to school to cut their lunch with, they're suspended because it's a weapon
- Child is attacked by a bully and is suspended, because they were involved in a fight
Adding information gathering systems that will quickly wind up being abused, but have very little possibly positive value... doesn't help with what's currently wrong with the system.
>Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it.
The other red flag is exactly zero examples of how using this data allowed anyone to "safeguard" at-risk youth or to "act quickly" to intervene.
It's profiling, plain and simple. Despite best intentions, it will definitely enable bias (unconscious or not) to be a factor in how children and their families/caregivers are treated.
This is the sort of thing that sounds good at first but ends up with these big brother databases.
Really, why is it the responsibility of the school to send home food with a child? Schools should teach. That's it. If there is a need to send food to some family, there are agencies and charities that are specifically created and empowered to do that job.
Using schools as conduits for all sorts of unrelated social services is why our schools are so fucked up. Instead of just being focused on teaching, they are now responsible for psychological services, food distribution to the needy, substance abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse intervention, mandatory reporting of any number of other concerns, all of which contributes to the need to monitor everything and centrally catalog and track as much information as you can about kids and their families.
It was one thing when this kind of stuff might be a note in a file folder, but now it's online, probably poorly secured, and will never be deleted.
A few times there's been a big media stories in the UK about a child who got badly abused or killed in domestic situations and then afterwards it turns out that various people (social services, teachers, charities etc) had concerns about the child's safety but concerns weren't written down or joined together and so the child could have been saved/rescued but wasn't.
So now in the UK we have a system of 'safeguarding referrals' where if someone has concerns they must make a safeguarding referral to social services but social services are terribly underfunded so the safeguarding referrals tend to pile up or just get filed unless they are really urgent. So now we have the problem of someone somewhere being responsible for wading through all the information and then identifying when the various reports from various places add up to a serious situation.
Hence you get an app like this where info from various agencies can be gathered in one place. https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...
If you're going to hold government services such as social services or teachers responsible for childrens safety then this sort of thing is needed. And if you think thats not the job of the state then fair enough thats your opinion but in the UK the status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after vulnerable children/people.
Think Family Database (TFD)
---------------------------
The Think Family Database (TFD) supports and connects safeguarding professionals from Bristol City Council and other public sector organisations.
The data collected by Insight Bristol is securely held in the TFD, and includes information from approximately 50,000 families across Bristol.
The TFD pulls together data from several public sector sources including:
-Bristol City Council (Children Social care, Early Help, Education)
-Avon and Somerset Police
-Department for Education
-Department for Work and Pensions
-South West Commissioning Support Unit (SWCSU)
The data from these organisations displays vulnerabilities or needs. It gives practitioners working with families an understanding of:
-the family's immediate need
-which services the need comes from
The practitioner can contact the relevant service. This helps the practitioner better support the family because:
-the practitioner can discuss the family's immediate issues with the agencies involved
-the family does not have to repeat the same story
This embedded approach helps practitioners coordinate support for families who are most in need. Sometimes those families are obvious but often they are hidden. The TFD highlights the hidden issues.
Using targeted analytics, the system also helps identify children at risk of:
-sexual exploitation
-criminal exploitation
-not being in education, employment, or training
This information supplements the wider council Think Family approach.
These models do not replace professional judgement or decision-making. They guide and supplement the work of professionals and provide information about children at risk that professionals may not easily see. This early identification means that support and interventions can be put in place to stop problems turning into crises.
This is quite natural given that ultimately the law poses the greatest threat to the leaders of charities, schools etc. You really don't want a high profile failure on your watch.
When I was trained to lead shifts of volunteers, it stood out to me that the only instruction I received was in safeguarding...
My first thought was that something simply isn't quite right, since safeguarding is far newer than the organisation itself.
But actually I think this is just the way of things. If you have enormous punishments, then you will have commensurate reactions from management.
We've lost a large number of volunteers because we can no longer guarantee anonymity to young people. Initially we were reassured that we would only be expected to report things when identifying information was willingly given to us. This has since been revised to instructions that we are to actively seek such information.
The law itself was brought in following high profile instances of horrific abuse that went overlooked by social services. However, the scope of the law is surprisingly wide.
For instance, this would all apply to a 17-year-old who mentions that they were being bullied by peers.
I myself do feel conflicted - abuse is terrible, and it's worth tolerating other kinds of indirect harm to prevent. But it's still shocking to me that the second order consequences don't appear to get discussed at all in the public sphere. I do worry that this has been snuck in as a "Save The Puppies Act" without proper deliberation.
I'm unsure if there are other countries who have pretty much identical laws, or if it is just the UK?
I think the issue is that it's very hard to have open discussions about accepting that certain events are unavoidable and preferable to the second order impacts of trying to 'solve the problem'.
It's hard to talk about at least in part that 'the problem' in these situations tends to be a terrible event that can be avoided, but only avoided by doing lots of lots of 'ever so slightly terrible' things. And so it takes a toll on the soul to look at the balance and say that we should live with 'the problem'.
I would love to find a name for this type of dynamic. I don't have words for the issue, and feel like I could communicate it more easily to others if I did.
How far are you willing to go?
edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between the two ludicrous extremes of 'everyone just look out for themselves' and 'collars that monitor every moment of their lives' based on general consensus arrived at via public discussion and democracy.
Not yet.
> edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between the two ludicrous extremes
That sensible conclusion is "you can't save everyone". If you try, you inevitably become the tyrant we must be saved from.
To save everyone, you require omniscience and omnipotence. You must know everything about your subjects and have the power to act on that knowledge. There's not a single human on this Earth I would trust with that power.
I never said you could.
It must be hard for you to get around with all these slippery slopes you keep seeing everywhere
> in the UK the status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after vulnerable children/people
You literally said it's the state's job to "look after" all those people.
So how far are you willing to go to save them? How much are you willing to sacrifice? Once you inevitably fail because of the limits of the system, will you respect those limits? Or will you sacrifice everyone's freedom and humanity to lift them?
This is the heart of the problem. When you start trying to turn people like teachers and doctors into something other than teachers and doctors you risk breaking the essential trust between parents and the professionals who have a role in their children's lives. That is a dangerous path to follow. Obviously no-one wants to see any child suffering abuse or neglect and obviously as a last resort the authorities might have to intervene to protect a vulnerable child from harm. But there are other dangers with measures like this that are easily overlooked in our culture today and I'm not sure that's healthy.
I do worry that our society has just resigned itself to the fact that these intrusions will happen and every now and then someone will suffer very badly as a result but "it would never happen to me". I find that ironic when the original subject was child protection where the main concern is situations that are relatively rare but can be very harmful for the child when they do happen.
That leads to unrealistic expectations that the government will somehow solve all problems. That in turn creates a political culture dominated by fear and CYA with an unhealthy side order of paranoia and everything conceivable being monitored/measured.
I don't know for sure what caused this. I suspect a product of several factors including 24/7 news, near-universal access to online systems and particularly social media, and a few high profile events like 9/11 where governments responded very badly and effectively encouraged a culture of fear. It's definitely something about our culture that has changed very clearly within my adult lifetime though. The idea of having principles and understanding why they matter feels very old-fashioned today. And again I don't think that's healthy for our society at all.
...but not the parents.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Admittedly, I don't think the schools should have this information either.
Of course! When has surveillance been used for anything, but protection?
I am making an extreme argument, there is obviously a line for CPS, but you have to remember that every system in the modern society is trying to be total. The police wants to stop crime, at all cost, if they could put is all in matrix like cells so we cant move they would. I will leave it to you to think what the ultimate goal of the education system is.
The only thing that stops systems from becoming total is our votes and also the fact that they are somewhat adversarial to each other e.g. if one becomes more total it consumes from the other system's power and so each systems fight for its life and multi dimensional predator/pray equilibrium is formed.
No, it's not. A school wanting to know a few things about a child is not "trying to be total". I get the extreme view; it can be warranted, but again, the worst case is not the average case, and we should just analyse the current case on its own merits.
What does “be total” means? I’m not familiar with the phrase.
> The police wants to stop crime, at all cost
Are you joking? Clearly not. There is so many things they could do if they “want to stop crime at all cost”.
> I will leave it to you to think what the ultimate goal of the education system is.
I don’t know what you are insinuating. Could you spell it out please?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.
I'm not excited about developments in Bristol, but introducing extreme paranoia isn't helpful. Just a low level of healthy paranoia is good enough.
Also, at least where I am, the drunk driving rates are high enough, that murder-by-car isn't exactly uncommon.
I don't think your counter-argument hits as hard as you think it does.
Also, some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into the database and this could then affect the families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been prejudiced by the data.
Worse yet, most police are at least classist. Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods.
What happens when there's already heavy policing of poorer neighborhoods, and police are trained to "get the bad ones off the streets"? They look for any excuse to arrest and prosecute people in those neighborhoods. Once you have a felony conviction on your record, you're basically unemployable for 10 years (in the US at least). Thus continuing the cycle of poverty. And of course, minorities tend to be disproportionately poor.
This makes that cycle worse. Anyone in the proximity of such a felon due to this data collection and aggregation now becomes a target by the police, raising their chances of getting caught up in the legal system and experiencing life-long consequences because of it.
I see this sentiment often. If this were true it would represent a criminal opportunity to victimize "wealthier neighborhoods." As far as I can tell: that does not seem to be the case very often; and victimization rates are higher in "poor neighborhoods."
I can see the logic of an argument that excessive legal criminalization induces cycles of harmful involvement in law enforcement and legal systems. However, using the language "policed far more heavily" as opposed to "criminalized far more heavily" places the blame on a convenient-to-scapegoat blue-collar occupation rather than directly upon the powerful people who compose the ever-expanding encyclopedia of laws and regulations.
Discretion in enforcement is either lawful or not. If discretion is the key problem and lawmakers do not address it, then yes, the responsibility is on lawmakers and ultimately on voters.
Let me address victimization rates - because yes, they are higher in poorer communities. That does not justify in any way the behavior of police in those communities, which is to randomly pull over/stop and search/etc. people on the street who "look" like bad guys. If somebody kills someone, sure, arrest them and put them in prison. Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it.
https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/incarceration-a...
The culture of policing is the key problem, which is created by a confluence of training, recruiting practices, general societal attitudes, and the political leadership of elected officials. It's not one problem, as you can see - it's many contributing factors.
A local town near me was praised some years back for drastically reducing violence by shifting towards community-based outreach policing. The local news actually called out Chicago for not following its example, you should definitely read about it:
https://www.aurora-il.org/1637/Community-Oriented-Policing-C...
Critics of community oriented policing typically view it as "being soft on crime" instead of a systems problem. The "put bad guys in prison" model has the effect of continuing the cycle of poverty, and measures such as mostly doing away with pre-trial detention (i.e. bond) for non-violent offenders are intended as a systemic fix for the poverty cycle.
Additionally, the americanactionforum.org link does not support the claim "Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it."
The link is somewhat inconsistent. It claims "The United States currently incarcerates 2.2 million people, nearly half of whom are non-violent drug offenders" and "Of the 2.2 million currently being held in the U.S. criminal justice system, nearly 500,000 people are being held for drug offenses." .5M is about a quarter of 2.2M.
Looking at one of the cited sources [2, Table 13], the latest data is 2019 and states that a slim majority of prisoners are in prison for violent crime. Given that the ojp.gov survey does not include pre-trial jail, maybe % nonviolent drug offenders is different from the below data, but my null hypothesis is that the proportions would remain largely similar.
Violent: 55.5%
Property: 16.0%
Drug: 14.1%
Public Order: 12.3%
Predatory individuals who are not safeguarding leads benefit much more from people campaigning to silo any records that suggest/confirm they might be a threat.
Senior leaders at schools don't need "data" to justify talking one on one to students or to figure out which students seem vulnerable.
On the other hand, data is useful for people with actual welfare concerns about a child in establishing if there might be some underlying reason behind the child's weird behaviour or expressed fear of going home or visible bruising that's "just an accident". Ensuring nobody can share threats data is a massive net boon to people that harm kids.
I very much enjoyed my time at an ordinary human child school and attended the mandatory educational lessons very promptly.
There's a balance between using data to identify problems and collecting data which is open to abuse. What concerns me is the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers who are typically not the most privacy focussed people. The predatory teacher example is an outlier, but it demonstrates how there can be unintended consequences. What's more likely is that there will be unconscious bias by the teachers against the disadvantaged children from poorer backgrounds.
To my mind, teachers should only function as a backup social service for those kids that slip through the net (admittedly, not a good net) and should be focussed primarily on education. What set my alarm bells ringing is the lack of openness about the database and whether families can correct false records (assuming they even know that the data exists).
Where did you get this impression?
The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about it found out because it's described in detail on the local authority website, the fact authorities keep records of stuff like absence from school and social worker contacts is universally known (most of the recent child victim scandals in the UK have been that various people noted of various possible signs of problems at various times but nobody had enough of a joined up view to actually act!) and the only bit teachers are going out of their way to not disclose is "I looked up Jonny's info because I'm not convinced that bruising is accidental".... for obvious reasons
Well for at least some values of "secret":
> School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: “They [parents and carers] wouldn’t know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don’t know of its existence.”
The article is short on details about how access is controlled to the database, so I am assuming (possibly making an ass out of u and ming) that it's poorly controlled. The lack of notification to the families is of concern although there's certainly scenarios where you specifically don't want them to be notified.
My biggest worry is further widening the gap between the rich and the poor and between different ethnic groups. Allowing teachers to have access to police data on the families could be very problematic.
So only the "pretty bad" uses of surveillance apply and that's ok? Not sure I understand your point.
In the US the fundamental Christians are grabbing power and they're taking flamethrowers to books and talking about tracking women who may go across state-lines to get an abortion. Self-censorship for fear of being 'canceled' is putting a damper on the spirit of freedom. It's perhaps more along the lines of Fahrenheit 451.
May you live in interesting times.
As a devout atheist, I have a particular view of Christians and from what I can gather, the Christo-fascists in the U.S. trying to grab power are Christian in name only and represent almost the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus. I think it's more of a fascist movement that picks on the most gullible and easily led of groups for their support base.
That's how it always works, even in the US. Selective enforcement of the laws against some group (or to favor some group).
For decades in the US, school administrators have been obsessed with monitoring student's online activity and email. There is a lucrative industry providing what amounts to glue and regexs for detecting and reporting suicidal language, threats of violence, and so on (you can be sure there's detection of LGBTQ language for all the various religious schools.)
There is a subreddit for K-12 IT administrators and the stuff people would post there about monitoring students was pretty shocking (also, the levels of incompetence are also pretty shocking. Most of the crowd are barely competent at IT basics. People who are in charge of IT at multiple campuses.)
Tell your kids that any email account associated with the school, and anything they even type into a school device (phone, tablet, laptop, computer) is monitored, and even the most innocent keyword could flag their email and put it front of admins. If they want to talk to a trusted friend about anything regarding the administrator or teachers, or something regarding mental health, sexuality, bullying, violence, etc - they need to do it on devices not associated with the school, with no school management software installed, on non-school accounts.
In fact, they should probably never use their school accounts or devices for anything except strictly school related communication and work.
It's amazing how completely ignorant these admins are that, say, hauling a suicidal student into a meeting with administrators is just about the last fucking thing that kid needs, and yet that's exactly what was described in some posts and discussions. The only thing they care about is snooping in student's activity and covering the school's ass.
Otherwise the advice should be, as you said, to never use a school device for anything not explicitly required by the school. But when there’s no other route, surveilled access is better than none, I guess?
It’s a tough quandary though - schools can be held liable, at least socially so if not legally, if kids use school provided devices for all the things kids use devices for that they shouldn’t. Meeting sexual predators, bullying, etc. Many parents are technically incapable of monitoring their online activity, others too busy. Schools are being put in a weird spot of being access providers to an adult world online, not just educators.
I’ll wager a lot of school surveillance started with parents demanding it.
It’s a tough subject, I don’t have the answer. My intuition tells me schools shouldn’t be involved in access OR monitoring, but I also understand the “digital divide” isn’t just a media term. A lot of pretty smart kids live in a pretty neglected context, and without access to sources of fact like Wikipedia or sources of dubious plagiarism like ChatGPT (tongue in cheek), they’re at a structural disadvantage that can’t be overcome through hard work alone.
There is zero need to be using "devices" in schools at least until High School, and I'd question even then.
Modern society is of course dominated by technology, so there's a strong argument for getting all kids to have experience in using it.
Finally, there’s an idea of digital literacy - the ability to use these tools to your advantage, and to navigate with sophistication the mental crack of algorithmic personalization. They will have a device at some point, and being taught at a younger age to be skeptical of mental crack might help weaken its hold (still to be seen!)
While schools can’t give you a good family or a nice house to study in, they certainly can give you an iPad.
Whilst being wealthy is an advantage, it's certainly not the gap it once was.
I'm always curious about what people mean by this, because usually its people upset they can't say the N-word or upset they're getting cancelled over being sex pests.
A good example is my partner getting pickpocketed on an empty tube train, which surely should make finding the person easy, right? Nope, the Met told me they'd need to go and pay the train maintenance company to retrieve the recordings from each carriage on the train, and they're not going to do that over a wallet.
In practice it works pretty well, because it implicitly sets a very high bar on the severity of the crime that would warrant retrieving dozens of recordings and tracing people through them. Skripal poisoning or murders get that treatment and are solved pretty quickly. Small scale crime (or whatever dystopian thought crime scenarios people imagine) doesn't.
obviously this is the case if you are a normal citizen. imagine how fast they'd access the recordings if a police officer was hurt, or to identify protesters, etc
Stuff like Ring (centralised, pervasive, and already cooperating with authorities) is way more sus than CCTV on British streets.
I have friends and family who work in education and other social care roles, so hear about the various training and policy they're given, and it almost feels like the public sector is putting parents on perpetual trial. And there's the underlying assumption of "if in doubt, raise it", with the false belief that a false report is harmless and will surely come out in the wash with no harm from the process.
Though it's important to remember this isn't down to the staff all being little Umbridges wanting to cause stress; as usual it's down to incentives. They are explicitly told they could be at fault for failing to report a Potential Safeguarding Issue, so it's the safer option in doubt. And at an organisational level, any instance where a child does come to harm leads to potentially nationwide accusations of negligence (sometimes fair) and demands to Do Something, no matter what that something is, what its collateral costs are, and if it even works in the first place.
And of course it would be unfair not to mention that the teachers themselves are often very much victims of similar overscrutiny, and are quite used to self-policing their behavior, with fear of both policy violations and parents' ire. Again, I'm largely criticizing the policy not the people. The common sense and discretion of workers on the ground is often a good defense against stupid policy, but not when there's a credible fear of being disciplined for that
My understanding is that the teachers that take on these roles are incredibly well trained, understand the responsibility, and know how to be both discreet and keep things privet. I believe a lot of the information available through this app was already being made available to the safeguarding leads in schools.
Challenging the use of this app is good, that's the role of these origination, checks and balances and all that. We need to be sure it is a net benefit for all involved. There is no denying though that if it helps teachers in safeguarding children that is a good thing.
That's pretty much what they're there for in the US as well.
The problem is the variability of quality of teachers. I seen and been involved, both as a parent and governor with Safeguarding leads. There has been wonderful, caring and talented teachers. I am not convinced the excellent teachers need more data - they know the kids and the families very well and can draw on years of experience and support.
There has been also teachers, which have out-dated views and prejudices. This tool in the wrong hand makes matters far worse. This feels like a tool put together with people with outdated views. Like teenage parents are an indicator of a need for safe-guarding or being out of work is a correlation for safe-guiding. This clear prejudices being born-out.
The secretive approach to this is unsettling, because it implies they know they're doing something they'd get in trouble for. It sounds like the administration's response was "well, this app was public, parents could have read up on it if they wanted", which resembles the old better to ask forgiveness than permission tactic. Clearly, every part of this plan should have been proactively explained to parents beforehand.
FWIW, the same secretive approach prevents anyone from knowing why their social media accounts were banned, or how changes to a website will affect their ranking in the search engines. Exposing the underlying algorithms creates an arms race that will lead to even bigger problems.
What exactly is the comparable threat model here? It's ridiculous. What are they exploiting, trace amounts of government resources? For one family?
https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...
By the way, can you send me your bank and credit card details so that I can just verify that you've done nothing wrong?
They're not keeping it secret. It's the same sort of thing as all the EULAs/T&Cs we have to click agree to: much too boring to pay attention to, unless it's a headline.
That said:
> How long we will keep your personal information?
> We will hold this information for as long as it is needed, or if we are required to do so by law. In practice this means that your personal information may be retained for the relevant period listed below:
> • Integrated family Support (1772), 75 years
- https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/5977-insight-bris...
How on Earth is 75 years a legitimate duration for any of this information?
It may be how UK tort law works, making it legally justifiable (or even legally mandatory), but the duration is still definitely stupid and wrong.
Well, "stupid and wrong" unless this is one of those things where you need to be a lawyer in the first place to understand all the moving parts that make no sense otherwise; but that's how bad it looks from here.
From TFA:
> School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: “They [parents and carers] wouldn’t know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don’t know of its existence.”
And it's not just police sharing data with schools, but also in the other direction where schools share data like unauthorized absences.
I think we as a society need to decide are we just biological automatons that can be controlled via inputs and outputs? Or do we believe in some form of free will and with that some personal privacy.
Financial situations? That sounds like they're monitoring what's easy to monitor, even if defending against domestic violence was the original intention.
That said, "we joined up thinking" is definitely a valid argument for much of what the UK is doing right now.
For those not following UK news: a large number of schools had to be closed this month due to people finally started paying attention to the fact that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete lasted 30 years but had been installed 50 years ago.
Monitoring that would have been sensible… but they'd have needed joined-up thinking to have noticed the problem had started happening in the 90s. (Thus making it one of the few cases where one can legitimately also spread blame to the previous Labour government even though the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years).
i think when they write things like that it means "we don't mean to expose the racist behavior of certain black students when we spy on them through apps we force them to install", which is pretty crooked all around
Some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into the database and this could then affect the families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been prejudiced by the data.
Critics say the reality is that this risks children from minority ethnic or poorer backgrounds being profiled as being involved in gangs or county lines operations.
So the fear seems to stem from this.
The goal of the service seems sensible, especially when you consider how often public services have made serious mistakes due to "information silos".
Universal 24-7 communication about absolutely everything would be a very very good thing. Take our whole society up a level.
Except that we have these big predators lurking about.
So the problem isn't the privacy, it's the predators. Right?
Personal identifying information does not belong to any company that gathers or purchases it unless they have specific permission (i.e. not some dark pattern "click here to disable the non-collection of your data") from the person and it is reasonable for them to have that data for their stated purpose. (Somewhat paraphrased from GDPR). The company and or government department need to have a strong reason to be manipulating the family's data and the family should have the right to see the data that is being held on them and also correct or delete it if it is incorrect.