At times I like to feel like 1984 didn't come true ever, and that our limited surveillence, in the grand scheme of things, is almost tolerable in comparison. But every time I see somethijg like this I change my mind. Everything here is about infiltrating the privacy of children and not about their safety. As soon as we get parents to accept this surveillence for their children, we know we're not far off from not just mass surveillance of metadata, but large scale surveillance of all Internet communication we conduct on a more-or-less personal level. If the current parents are okay with it, how much more will future parents allow now that the precedent is being set? How much intrusion will these children be willing to take once they're grown up?
So basically the school system doesn't want oversight?<p>FTA:<p>> <i>Details of the 12 police investigations that stemmed from searches in the past year have not been divulged by the school system. The school system told the Orlando Sentinel that it doesn't want public details of the program to interfere with its effectiveness.</i>
I'd be ok with this... if it only monitored posts made during school hours on days students were present. But it doesn't, so I'm not ok with this.<p>Looking on the bright side, a bunch of kids are gonna get a crash course in basic opsec aka "not posting stuff you wouldn't want your boss/the cops/the entire world to see online" unfortunately this will probably screw up the lives of a lot of students who come into contact with law enforcement when they really just need help.
The whole point of making public posts is because they want lots of people to see them. So who cares if the school sees them too? That's part of the public. It's not spying if the spyee is intentionally broadcasting the information and wants everyone to see it.<p>Imagine if a teacher walked past some kids bullying their classmate in the hall. She overhears the insults they're shouting and then calls the bullies in to tell them off. Isn't that what we want? Do we want school staff to turn a blind eye to bullying and stand by when they know who's doing it and what they're doing?
I'm so glad I grew up some twenty to thirty years prior to this.<p>I was bullied and there was nothing any grown up could have done without me telling them about the bullying.<p>Non the less, as said above, I am glad to not gave to grow up in this panopticon.
It seems every time there's a mass shooting or a tragic suicide, people find out there were a bunch of social media posts beforehand that clearly broadcast the perpetrator's intent. Every time we ask "Why didn't anyone see this coming?"<p>Well, this is us "looking" to see these things coming, but now analyzing publicly available information is a violation of privacy?
Well, it's apparently public posts that are being searched. So kids just need to learn some OPSEC, no?<p>But indeed, it must suck, growing up in the panopticon :(
I'm not normally in favor of surveillance, or reporting students to police for minor infractions. But for me the key sentence is here:<p>> collects data from public posts on students' social media accounts<p>Calling this "spying" is disingenuous. There's no spying going on if person A posts something to be available to the general public, and then person B, a member of the general public (in this case the school's social media subcontractor), looks at the post.
2016 Police Report: 4 kids were successfully stopped from stealing candy. Parents suing us because kids suffered psychological damage and now have a criminal record, but we all know that this is just caused by bad parenting.
What better way to prepare children for life under secret, quasi-legal mass surveillance by officials.<p>If the innocent are caught up in the dragnet, the neologism <i>collatoral intrusion</i> exists.<p>Freedom from warantless search never applied to children's diaries, schools are <i>in loco parentis</i>.<p>If an overactive imagination doesn't make one culpable it cannot be ignored by liable officials and may be an indictor of intent, disposition or a pre-crime.<p>As a society we have decided no price is too high for child safety.<p>The only flaw I can see in this scheme are officials with less than perfect judgement or their own prejudices.<p>/s
I can't comment on this specific school district, but in my own school district, there have been a fair number of instances where it was discovered, after an incident, that students had been planning a fight or physical confrontation for days in advance on social media. If the district had programs like this in place, it could have actually improved student safety. I know many here are claiming that this is just a pretense for monitoring students, but that's not what it looks like from my perspective.