
Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy - kawera
https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-privacy
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Haydos585x2
I used to work in school IT and had products pitched to us constantly that
would be basically malware/RATs to spy on students. We could purchase anything
that would help us look at Facebook messages, emails, documents/picture,
anything really. Our department went against it for a few reasons:

\- If you have this knowledge you need to monitor it. If a student is writing
about killing themselves in a document on their machine then they follow
through and we had access to that knowledge it becomes our problem.

\- Opens us up to far more knowledge than we had before, knowledge we didn't
necessarily want. Kids are kids. We're trying to make adults and should give
them a certain amount of free reign to learn and make mistakes without us
watching them all the time.

\- Our IT department just didn't feel that it was the best idea and agreed
with it on moral/ethic grounds.

EDIT: I should also clarify that all of these tools went beyond what we would
need to administer devices from an IT standpoint. Our other tools were more
stop a malicious PDF than read little Johnny's email.

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ourmandave
Reminds me of a Pennsylvania school "WebcamGate" in 2010.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District)

The school's IT dept had a program to control the student's laptop camera so
if it was lost or stolen they could take a picture and see where it was and
with who.

It didn't end well.

~~~
Haydos585x2
Yep, you're totally right. Different country and different product but if
anyone is unsure what features these tools have available they should read
that wikipedia page.

We all knew at some point it would be used inappropriately and we'd all be
responsible in some way. I think schools and their departments are right to
move away from these types of tools. They're teenage kids, not some domestic
terrorist with an enormous network.

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lkz0r
Created a throwaway just for this as I'd like to remain anonymous. I'm
currently in high school, though I picked up programming early. My school
decided to purchase a bunch of "educational" tablets for the student populace
a while back (wasting a million or so in the process). All in all, they were a
disaster. Not only were they not used for their intended purpose, they were a
huge distraction in the classroom. Kids would be watching youtube videos, and
worse, through the various proxy sites the school could never seem to block,
all when they should have been paying attention. I wouldn't be surprised if
performance dropped as a result.

That aside, I couldn't agree more with the issues in the report. There was no
opt-out: no tablet meant no grades. You'd be a fool to expect any privacy. It
was obvious school officials had some form of remote access: they could in
theory lock the screen (this was easily circumvented by going offline), but to
what degree, we couldn't be sure. For all I knew, they could have live access
to the camera and microphone.

From this experience, it seems pretty clear that just throwing technology at
students in hopes it helps them "learn" isn't going to work. The money wasted
on this program could have been put to much better use, training teachers and
actually buying books.

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WalterBright
Computers have been heralded as the magic answer to teaching kids for 40 years
now. There have been no positive results yet. It's not hard to see why -
putting computers in the classroom is like putting labor saving devices in the
gym.

Learning requires focused effort and work, there's just no way around it.

~~~
sannee
I think it's because people are attempting to somehow "improve" the current
educational methods using techno magic assuming that "if we do the stand-in-
front-of-a-blackboard thing except with tablets" is going to lead to any sort
of an improvement.

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mikegerwitz
Does anyone here have experience with approaching their districts?

I had a meeting last year with three assistant superintendents to discuss
issues related to student privacy. New York has a student privacy law (§2-d of
EDC Title 1 Article 1) passed as part of the Common Core Reform Act that
establishes a Parents' Bill of Rights for Data Privacy and Security, which
must be completed 120 days after its effective date of 12/08/2016\. Among
other things, this document must list all third parties to which student PII
is provided, for what purpose, and state that they take the proper precautions
to protect student data. That date---04/07/2017---has since passed.
Unfortunately, my district (and possibly the entire county, Erie) is far
behind.

We also discussed school devices---they're moving toward a device-per-child
model---and we expressed to one-another our concerns. The EFF's resources were
essential in my research and provided resources for the district as well.

The EFF was kind enough to put me in touch with a lawyer practicing in NY with
an interest in student privacy to provide pro bono counsel as I figure out the
best way to move forward. I'm going to try my hardest to keep on good terms
with the district; going the route of issuing FOIA requests and such is a last
resort. Finding other concerned parents in my district is likely my next step.

My oldest son is entering first grade this year, so this is a fairly urgent
priority for me.

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open-source-ux
Why is there so little scrutiny over Chromebooks in schools? Every time this
topic is raised, people rush to Google's defence. Yes, I know Google doesn't
create advertising profiles from student data. This doesn't make their data
collection behaviour defensible. They are still capturing student data in
staggering quantities.

Even if the data is "anonymous" (a meaningless term) and aggregated in some
form, this is still an unimaginably huge quantity of student data that Google
have captured and saved for themselves.

Rather than ask what kind of tracking is acceptable, we should instead ask:
why is tracking of students (who have no choice in the matter) even considered
acceptable in the first place?

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gruez
OT: Anyone know why a comment in this post went dead in less than 4 minutes?
It was pretty substantive and didn't contain anything inflammatory, although
the author did say he was using a throwaway.

link to comment (you need enable showdead in settings to read it):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272)

~~~
aaron695
New accounts comments can be autoflagged for various reasons.

Vouch for it, as we can see someone has. The system works.

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gruez
>Vouch for it, as we can see someone has. The system works.

Can you even do that? I thought flag/vouch only works for links.

~~~
grzm
As 'aaron695 said, it works for comments as well. If you want to confirm, turn
on showdead and view some comments. You should see a vouch link.

~~~
gruez
yeah, i see it now. you have to click into a comment before it shows up.

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RichardHeart
For some terrible reason, societies tend to believe that the younger you are,
the less deserving of rights you are. Even rights such as this, where having
privacy would carry less risk than an older person perhaps seeing dangerous
things from the younger people. They still do the wrong thing and rob the
younger people of their human rights. (Dangerous here means that in most
countries, if you eyes or ears detect lewd behavior under a certain age, you
go to jail.)

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sweep4r
Kids should have absolutely no expectation of privacy.

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saagarjha
Why, and from whom? Their parents? Their school? Corporations?

~~~
alacombe
I'd argue, at foremost, from their parents. [and yes, I was very aware of this
fact to the extent that my first real-world application of programming was to
automate obfuscate my browsing history as a teenager.]

