U.S. School Monitoring Software Sacrifices Student Privacy for Unproven Promises of Safety, Digital Rights Says
U.S. School Monitoring Software Sacrifices Student Privacy for Unproven Promises of Safety, Digital Rights Says
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’...
Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the U.S. 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.
"As we demonstrated with our own Red Flag Machine, however, this software flags and blocks websites for spurious reasons and often disproportionately targets disadvantaged, minority and LGBTQ youth," the Electronic Software Foundation (EFF) says.
The companies making the software claim it’s all done for the sake of student safety: preventing self-harm, suicide, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. While a noble goal, given that suicide is the second highest cause of death among American youth 10-14 years old, no comprehensive or independent studies have shown an increase in student safety linked to the usage of this software. Quite to the contrary: a recent comprehensive RAND research study shows that such AI monitoring software may cause more harm than good.
This is awful. Surveillance is not a replacement for childcare. How many times must people say it. It is also not a replacement for managing employees or any other thing. I hate this timeline.
24Tell that to my mother when I was a teenager.
8
Yeah, that'll be misused. Without a doubt.
What an awful development.
20That's pretty much what it's for.
- https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-02-18/high-school-issues-laptops-uses-them-to-spy-on-students/
- https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-02-23/more-from-the-lower-merion-school-district/
- https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-03-08/lower-merion-quietly-places-two-of-their-it-staff-on-leave/
- https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-04-18/lower-marion-school-districts-stash-of-surveillance-photos-found/
- https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-08-22/an-interesting-development-in-the-lower-marion-school-district-s/
6Don’t put personal shit on work devices. This is pretty basic.
5Kids going to school cannot reasonably be expected to have the knowledge, forethought, or ability to protect themselves from privacy violations. They lack the rights, info and social power to meaningfully do anything about this. That's why it's exploitative and harmful. Edit: that's also to say nothing of the chilling effect this is going to have on kids who DO need to talk about something but now feel they have to hide it, or feel ashamed of it. Shit is bad news all around.
26Not all of these kids have any other computer.
4School is not work. Work is compensated. Work is voluntary. School is neither.
4
I suspect the real reason they are doing this is to condition the students to accept oppressive and unjust surveillance in future workplaces.
18I doubt the school administrators who would be buying this thing or the people trying to make money off it have really thought that far ahead or care whether or not it does that, but it would definitely be one of its main effects.
9Just as securicams in schools in the 90's conditioned a lot of people to accept on-street surveillance.
5