Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens

This kind of system is now required by law in UK schools, meaning that we have to MITM all student traffic even on their own devices, and some of the alerts are really really vague since they're just matching anything in search terms (my favourite being an alert for the word "gang" because "river ganges" was searched on Google)

> “It is hard to switch it off,” he said. “I mean, the consequences of switching it off is that somebody can die.”

safetyism rules everything around me.

Digital surveillance is often marketed as a form of harm reduction, with a focus on some metric that is easy to measure.

What is more often ignored is the potential for harm creation imposed by the measurement process itself: after all, such externalities are subtle and hard to quantify, even if they may ultimately sum in total to a larger quantity, potentially yielding a net positive harm overall.

Some would likely argue that we should prioritize the known over the unknown, but I'd rather not sign up my kids to be your guinea pig, especially if you have already demonstrated yourself to be a rotten scientist.

Aside from technical concerns, how do they think this move comes across? People value their privacy in many aspects of their life, even those who claim they have "nothing to hide". Window blinds aren't for keeping people from breaking in, not directly anyways. It's even worse when the reason for this breach of privacy is already psychologically risky. I would suppose that if the government is so competent, why not spy on bullies and bigots and stop the problem at its root? But society doesn't even really shun those people in the first place!

False alarms for the most part appear to be just someone scanning and disregarding an issue like surveillance watching someone to make sure they aren't stealing in the supermarket. There are more intrusive ones, but that appears to be edge cases in my reading of the article.

I do break from the perspective of the majority here and believe that the interventions do outweigh the false alarms given that. I do think laws need to be established so that what warrants flagging is clear and apolitical and that the tracking cannot be used for any purposes outside of safety (ie if a kid talks about cheating on a test and t is found through this method, it should be disregarded)

Don't use school-provided or employer-provided devices for personal use. MITM of your personal traffic is a thing.

that feels dystopian. And it's reflected by the title of the webpage: "The Brave New World of A.I.-Powered Self-Harm Alerts"