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School Monitoring Software Sacrifices Student Privacy for Unproven Promises of Safety

www.eff.org School Monitoring Software Sacrifices Student Privacy for Unproven Promises of Safety

Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the country don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’...

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5 comments
  • Someone is making money off of the surveillance and that someone knows someone else in the board of education. That's why it exists. It has nothing to do with sudent safety.

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  • ”Millions of students across the country don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts”

    So the big issue with this is that they shouldn’t have private communications on their school laptops anyway. It’s the exact same thing with companies not wanting you to use their provided devices for personal reasons.

    They own the device, you’re borrowing it, assume it’s compromised on every level and keep any communication that matters on your own devices.

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    • I agree with this sentiment 100%, but I think it lacks some of the context that these are children we are talking about. They aren't being educated on privacy or security; not by their schools, and certainly not by their parents. This generation is being raised to believe that everything they do and say needs to be posted online to social media, and their concept of privacy is virtually nonexistent. Couple that with the fact that most of them don't have a personal computer, and it leads to great levels of negligence with regard to their use of technology, and most relevant to this discussion, their use of school computers. The children being surveiled and exploited by this software don't have the education on it to understand why it is bad, or even that it is happening to begin with.

      So while yes, they shouldn't have private communications on school computers, they don't have the context to understand that or independently come to that conclusion themselves, thus those private communications will happen nonetheless.

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  • Its not save, it's the opposite.

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  • Because fuck students. We always have, sometimes literally.

    This is what we call a moral hazard, , when the fucked up consequences for your actions that benefit you are visited upon someone else.

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