> Evergreen Public Schools in Washington state, for example, started using the company's service this school year. Between September and mid-March, the system flagged more than 9,000 incidents in the 26,000-student district. The overwhelming majority-84 percent-were for minor violations, such as profanity.<p>The fact that the system even monitors for profanity at all tells me its purpose has a lot more to do with student surveillance than it does with student safety.
To fight this, I don't think we should be talking about privacy or rights. That's all very important, but society is already fairly desensitized to that language, and the pro-surveillance side can literally point to the dead bodies of real children.<p>Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children. Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.
I cannot believe that these people are so dense:<p>><i>"Why would it have a chilling effect if the superintendent of the school might see something that slips through the system about someone went hunting?" he asked. "There's no threat."</i><p>How is the following not harm?<p>><i>He pointed to a recent incident in which Social Sentinel flagged a college student who threatened on Twitter to shoot his professor for scheduling an early morning exam. (The student, who said he intended no harm, was arrested.)</i>
<i>"The local Brazosport Independent School District had recently hired a company called Social Sentinel to monitor public posts from all users, including adults, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The company's algorithms flagged Lafrenais's tweet as a potential threat. Automated alerts were sent to the district's superintendent, chief of police, director of student services, and director of guidance. All told, nearly 140 such alerts were delivered to Brazosport officials during the first eight months of this school year..."</i><p>OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations.
Ah Clute, Texas. Howdy from Brazosport class of 2002! This is the second article mentioning this area on HN I've seen in the last 3 years or so. The first one mentioned Brazosport as the dropout capital of the entire USA. So I doubt anyone within a 100 mile radius of there has ever heard of HN (but waiting to be proven wrong).<p>Edit:<p>I guess to add more context. This is probably an example of a small, underfunded, school district being coaxed into purchasing something it doesn't even need, or the administration doesn't even understand.
Schools in certain parts of the US, usually with more unruly students from lower income backgrounds, are pretty much set up like prisons. You can't leave the premises as the exits are heavily guarded, there are cops present, there are various sorts of checkpoints where things are searched. Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious. It's a bit of a mess.
I bullied a kid in middle school to the point where he switched classes. Teachers didn’t panick and kick me out, rather they listened to both sides and let us figure it out. We talked and became really good friends, even to this day!<p>Humans aren’t perfect. I’m not saying bullying is good, but the best solution is not to punishment. I’d certainly spiral out of control and become a monster had I been kicked out.<p>Scandinavian pedagogy is great!
"the secret [to creating fiction about technology that stays relevant] is basically to assume that people will be really stupid about technology for the foreseeable future."<p>Cory Doctorow on the anniversary of "Little Brother"
<a href="https://craphound.com/littlebrother/" rel="nofollow">https://craphound.com/littlebrother/</a>
This is nasty, but the unpleasant truth is that these schools are just rationally responding to public pressure and doing CYA. Every time there's a school shooter, the first thing the parents and media do is dig through his angry Facebook posts and go, "Look at all these red flags! Why wasn't anything done?". Well, now the schools are doing something. It's not the <i>right</i> thing to do, and it's not going to fix anything, but getting angry at the schools isn't going to cause them to change course: they're responding to public demand. You need to start talking to parents and educating <i>them</i>.
Teach them early that we don’t live in free societies any more. How else would you go about building tomorrow’s distopia?<p>We actually need the opposite: we need schools that create educated, crtically thinking individuals that don’t hessitate to work together for thw future.
I think this is just a strategy for moving the Overton window.<p>"Look what we can do! Instead we opted in for this [vendor] MITM proxy and cameras in each classroom that snoop on your kids' activities! Much less invasive ;)"
I was (and still am) against the monitoring, restriction and limiting of student devices at school. I find it deeply disturbing that children are going to be monitored when they aren't even on school grounds, it's nightmarish. Every day homeschooling my future children looks exponentially better.
if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent.<p>imagine how many times you made a snide remark about a teacher or a principal to your peers in confidence. now, the target of your jeer will know that you're talking shit -- and, much like if they were to overhear trash talk about them in the hallways, they won't tolerate it. and so a bunch of harmless children will be caught in the surveillance net, and punished for normal behavior.<p>even worse, down the line you can be certain that state actors will gain access to the data sets produced by surveillance. then, in these kids' dossiers, they'll be marked as having anti-authoritarian tendencies as a result of their childhood discussions which were snooped on. throw in a social credit system, and someone may have a childhood remark following them for life.
It's not clear from the article how the system monitors encrypted social media traffic. Perhaps Twitter as it is public afterward, right? Or does it look for public posts to local groups in Facebook? Or everyone has location tagging on posts on other sites?<p>How are these companies getting their information to analyze?
Do any of the naysayers here work in a public capacity- teacher, law enforcement, military/intelligence, etc? Have you ever been solely responsible for the security and well-being of more than, say a half-dozen total strangers? It's a hard problem, a continual tweaking of what we would see as engineering trade-offs, usually performed by people with minimal training, support, or reward who are stuck with the responsibility by default.<p>Supposedly we're here because we want to apply technology to hard problems- well, here's one of the hardest, and here's how it's been applied so far. Let's have a more reasonable discussion than a bunch of thin-veiled whining about how it will affect our torrents.
I was the type of high school student that would deliberately spam profanity and other things that would trigger this system just to spite the administrators. Privacy through obfuscation: when alarm bell rings all the time then the alarm bell becomes meaningless.