Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

A few years ago I found out my nephew&#x27;s Kindergarten had implemented fingerprint scanners for all students. They get to scan their fingerprint when checking in or out of lunch, going to the bathroom, arriving and leaving school.<p>Promoted as a safety feature to ensure they knew where the kids were and that they were ok. I was asked to go in with my brother and talk to them about it. They said it was all ok because that the actual fingerprints aren&#x27;t stored on the system, only information derived from the fingerprints, the system wasn&#x27;t costing them anything because some Edu-Tech company was paying for it as a test, no other persons had complained about the tech, not one, we were the first, and it&#x27;s kind of weird that we are opposed to children&#x27;s safety.<p>We asked that my nephew not participate in the trial and they agreed, though he reported after that he was often forced to be scanned anyway.<p>A couple years later I asked another parent about the fingerprint scanners and they didn&#x27;t know what I was talking about, so either they were removed, or parents are simply not reading the notices they are sent home and often even asked to sign.

A while back in Texas my wife and I got a lovely call from one of our children&#x27;s school counselors because our child&#x27;s search history the previous evening, on their school issued chrome laptop, had included a search for symptoms of cyanide poisoning which apparently triggered one of the systems used to detect those sorts of things. It turns out that the search was related to a homework assignment for a book they had been reading...

It’s pretty much guaranteed that the next generation will grow up with the experience of always watched. Either they get watched by the parents who never let them do anything alone or by technology. Pretty sad in my view but almost inevitable.

How can the schools just allow any free product to be installed in their systems simply because someone offered them said service or product for free. These (test subjects) are our kids. There should be boundaries set forth by the law not to allow any said system or service to collect any data on kids under a given age.<p>I guess as long as someone offers security - it’s ok to disregard privacy.

&gt;GoGuardian, a company that monitors students’ internet searches, that a student was doing a Google search for “how to kill myself” late one evening.<p>How is it monitoring searches done at home in the evening?

It seems like the product was originally an internet filter for pornography etc. but now the companies are competing on features. The main one is the profanity filter but they&#x27;ve started using AI to detect other things like self-harm threats etc.<p>The monitoring seems mostly limited to school laptops and cloud services, so presumably students who don&#x27;t like it can use their phones if they have them. The companies all have more invasive home products but those report to the parents rather than the school.

This will be a perfect way to teach my children about online privacy, how computers and the internet work and how to circumvent surveillance.

Another story that has not been told is how gifted students in America are inventoried and tracked with IQ tests and other supposed &quot;resource&quot; programs. The GATE program in California is just one example of a dual-purpose, duplicitous program that can be easily exploited for spy and national security research recruiting to the military-industrial complex. More investigative journalism research on this topic is needed to find out exactly who, what, when and where it may be going on.

As long as it&#x27;s limited to school devices and school email&#x2F;chat, I don&#x27;t see the problem. Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but my dad instilled in me early on that anything I do on the internet is there permanently for anyone who cares enough to see.<p>The problem arises from immediate action on the part of the administrators, stemming from zero-tolerance policies that are usually present. Exercising restraint with respect to these tools would lead to better outcomes, in my opinion.

I mean this is the new (Omniviolence future article from a few days ago) world, they might as well get used to it now...

An interesting example of why cost of education can have unbounded growth. Parents who sue schools are actually suing society.

They will probably receiprocate this amount of distrust at some point in their lives.<p>But go ahead, treat children like criminals. Perhaps some will even do a good old school shooting and you could finally be proud of yourselves that you have seen it coming. It would let the industry flourish like nothing else.<p>&quot;Schools feel massive pressure to demonstrate that they’re doing something to keep kids safe&quot; - No kidding...