
Gaggle monitors the work and communications of almost 5M students in the US - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinehaskins1/gaggle-school-surveillance-technology-education
======
choward
This is completely absurd and I'm convinced it solves zero problems. The kids
don't know they're being spied on until they do something "wrong". Gaggle (a
terrible name btw) claim they prevent suicides and school shootings. This
might "work" at first until kids know they are being spied on. Now they know
not to send an email saying "I'm going to kill people". All your doing is
preventing communication using school provided technology and eroding students
trust in the school. You're not actually preventing a shooting. Kids can still
do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

On top of that they monitor for profanity. WHY? It doesn't harm anyone and
let's people express themselves how they want.

If I was a parent I wouldn't want some random people at a for profit company
spying on my child. That's my job.

Do kids still read 1984?

~~~
anon1m0us
How much of this is typical social indoctrination? Teach children early that
they are constantly spied on and they'll accept it in their cars, on their
phones, in their houses. Total surveillance state.

I'm more and more certain much of this is the result of post-modernism. God is
dead. We can no longer expect the fear of hell or desire for heaven to keep us
in line, so the state must become the omniscient god watching over us.

~~~
losteric
> I'm more and more certain much of this is the result of post-modernism. God
> is dead. We can no longer expect the fear of hell or desire for heaven to
> keep us in line, so the state must become the omniscient god watching over
> us.

I wish more people would see our police state through that lens, because hell
and heaven never kept people in line and the state will do no better. It's all
just metric-driven management... in the long-run, nothing really keeps the
masses in line.

~~~
nyolfen
incentive structures and monitoring don't influence people's behavior?

~~~
floren
People still murdered and committed adultery and broke the Sabbath even after
they'd been told that an omniscient being would definitely know and punish
them. I think that was the poster's point, anyway.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
(not personally religious, or really for surveillance in schools, would
probably teach my children to build their skills circumventing it to be
honest)

But surely that's a strawman. No one thinks religion would stop all evil or
all people, but there certainly seems to be some kind of psychological effect
from being brought up in such a framework, which can be observed, for
instance, in latent guilt and residual fear of hell and judgement that happens
when people leave certain christian sects for instance, which is totally
absent and baffling to those not from such a cultural background.

I think its eminently feasible that SOME people are being 'held in line'
through explicit or implicit fear of
rules/authority/sanctity/hell/punishment/purity/etc provided by religious and
social structures.

~~~
anon1m0us
I suspect _I_ am. Do you not think about what you search for on the internet
before you do it? Sometimes I really have to think, "do I want google to know
I want to know about this?"

Even if you use DDG, you go to a site with GA on it, google cdn, maybe
facebook too, anything with those icons to share with a social media site.

Even searching for symptoms. I was searching for something my girlfriend
mentioned the other day and now wondering if I'll start seeing some kind of ad
related to the issue.

It's not good.

------
habnds
Hard not to compare this to surveillance in mainland China.

> Among the many banned words and phrases on Gaggle’s list are "suicide,"
> "kill myself," "want to die," "hurt me,” "drunk," and "heroin."

Children growing up in this sort of environment will come to expect it from
their government.

I wonder if they have any data at all that shows they can actually prevent
catastrophes with this sort of system or if this is just a placebo with
dangerous social side effects?

~~~
journalctl
Also, have they ever actually seen kids communicate? With the way the world
seems to be, my friends and I joked a lot about wanting to die (and still do).
We don’t actually mean it, it’s just a really strong way of saying that shit’s
messed up and it’s all rather absurd. The joke itself also implies
irreverence. It’s usually taboo to joke about dying, so doing so is a bit
subversive. It can also be used as pure ironic detachment. For example: [1]. I
don’t know if current youths make jokes like this, but my friends and I do.

Anyway, yeah, restricting a few key phrases is amateur hour. It doesn’t
actually help, and kids will just find ways around it anyway. Wait until they
discover Unicode homographs!

[1] [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/like-this-image-to-die-
instan...](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/like-this-image-to-die-instantly)

~~~
amatecha
hahaha! I am laughing so much at these images right now. Genius.

It's totally true though - no amount of word filtering is ever going to serve
a real, tangible purpose for people who are having a consensual conversation
between each other. Further, if AIM or ICQ back in the day had filtered my
conversations, my friends and I would have just moved to one of the other many
services that _don't_ use such filtering. It was bad enough when they started
showing automatic previews of URLs in messages, the last thing I need is
something actually modifying or acting on the text content of the messages.

------
sdan
This made me laugh. I'm currently in High School and we use GSuite (we also
used GSuite in elementary/middle school for that matter), but am not 100% if
we use Gaggle, but even if we did:

Once kids come into HS/Middle School at least now in 2019/2020, most if not
all use personal emails and external chatting apps (most likely Messenger if
not Instagram Messages or Snapchat). Compounded with psuedonyms, it's hard for
any AI to determine who's chatting who... and even if FB/Snap knew who it was,
I'm somewhat certain they wouldn't do anything.

However, in Elementary school, email and Hangouts was the way to go
(experience from siblings and myself around 5 years ago), so I guess Gaggle's
"AI" can determine if elementary and some middle school kids are a "threat".

Regardless, kids nowadays are really into "self-deprecating jokes": "I want to
KMS" or other abusive/harmful messages which a good majority use as jokes (in
my experience) although they don't have any wrong intentions. I think any AI
or NLP model to determine which is a credible threat and which isn't will be
extremely hard to tell, even for humans who aren't teens.

~~~
hdctambien
The students at my school used to joke and say KMS and KYS all the time,
too... until one of those kids actually did. And then they stopped saying that
to each other almost over night.

Sometimes you are joking, but the person you are joking with isn't. Think
about that next time you jokingly tell someone to KYS because they got a 65 on
a quiz.

~~~
tortasaur
You're implying that an environment where people don't jokingly reference
suicide would have led to a better outcome. Is there evidence for this?

~~~
lonelappde
So you have evidence that telling people to kill themselves is safe?

------
mindgam3
> Gaggle is one of the biggest players in today’s new economy of student
> surveillance, in which student work and behavior are scrutinized for
> indicators of violence or a mental health crisis, and profanity and
> sexuality are policed.

There has to be a way to reach so-called “troubled” kids without creating a
culture of fear around expressing difficult emotions. This is part of a larger
trend of parenting surveillance tech (ie Life360) that I find quite
disturbing.

Schools seem much more willing to pay for newfangled tech rather than more
trained counselors, for example. Outsourcing content moderation to low-paid
contract workers is what gave us Facebook. I fear that these technologies will
put a nice band-aid on the problem of student mental health while actually
making it worse.

~~~
AlexandrB
This is a combination of CYA (“we did everything we could, we even surveilled
all their communications”), and tech “magic” mentality: where new, unproven
technologies are sold as an easy fix for complex societal issues. 10 years
from now we’ll read about how none of this actually helped any kid in real
crisis - but it’ll make a few school administrators feel good and in control
for a few years.

The bigger problem is that unlike previous similar boondoggles (see D.A.R.E.),
this might have lasting consequences by acclimating a generation to constant
surveillance.

~~~
phnofive
I’d not be at all surprised to learn D.A.R.E. went a long way to vilifying
drug users.

------
AlexB138
I try to have a charitable interpretation of other people's actions, but I
can't help but feel like this is the old trick of using "think of the
children" to force the leading edge of a wedge on something reprehensible.

This is an absolutely disgusting level of surveillance on developing minds,
and trains them to think it's normal to live in a virtual panopticon. It's
easy to force societal change by poisoning the impressionable minds of
children and simply waiting.

~~~
AWildC182
It's not even meaningful. I read through the article and it's just scanning
word docs and anything else that goes through your school email account. How
many kids are dumb enough to threaten harm upon themselves or others, or
otherwise share explicit imagery on their school email account...

All this does is get kids used to being watched.

------
dansman805
I am currently attending a school at which GSuite and Gaggle are both used. I
agree that Gaggle is extreme, especially the "three strikes" system.

On the other hand, I also try to avoid tying my school online identity to my
personal online identity, and leave my school account for school. That also
means not doing anything personal on district provided chromebooks. However, I
only really know to do this due to knowledge in technology focused areas, not
something most students have.

My main issue with this sort of tracking is that the students are very loosely
told what it is tracked and how; at our school, students were told that the
chromebooks used gaggle and not much more than that.

Overall, students and parents should definitely be better taught as to what
occurs with surveillance, and in my opinion the current level of surveillance
is extremely excessive.

------
timlod
From Gaggle's FAQ ([https://www.gaggle.net/frequently-asked-
questions/](https://www.gaggle.net/frequently-asked-questions/)):

How much does Gaggle Safety Management cost?

Gaggle Safety Management truly is a one-of-kind solution that shouldn’t be
mistaken for a less expensive or free alternative. We understand that no two
school districts are alike, so our per student pricing is based on your
specific requirements as well as the size of your student population. Pricing
for other Gaggle solutions also can be customized to the needs of your school
or district.

 _Perhaps a better question to ask is "How much will it cost your school or
district if you don't use Gaggle Safety Management?"_ (emphasis mine)

A lot of their webpage seems to be riding on fear, as is visible when just
visiting their homepage.

------
analog31
My school district started giving out a Chromebook to each kid, and has these
things locked down pretty tight. Kids are forbidden from installing their own
software. (We tried installing Python / Jupyter). They also hired a
surveillance company, maybe the one mentioned in the article.

They conducted a trial run of the surveillance service at one middle school
for a couple months, whereupon they claimed that it prevented two suicides. A
suicide per month in a single middle school isn't remotely plausible.

Now of course the kids know about the surveillance. It was announced in the
newspaper. But already for years, parents have already been teaching our kids
about dealing with the internet: Don't write anything that you wouldn't want
to see on the front page of the New York Times. Don't admit to being a member
of a hated group. Don't criticize governments that are capable of carrying out
censorship beyond their borders. Assume that all "private" information will be
stolen or sold.

My kids have told me that every kid at school has figured out how to install a
VPN on their cellphone, so they can bypass the content blockers. They know
that the VPNs themselves aren't secure. They don't use the Chromebooks except
to look up school assignments (which are themselves surveilled via anti-
plagiarism service).

Unfortunately the short term desire for entertainment, and to be part of a
community, outweighs their long term concerns for security and privacy. But at
least from the standpoint of being informed, they're quite well informed.

~~~
DanBC
> whereupon they claimed that it prevented two suicides. A suicide per month
> in a single middle school isn't remotely plausible.

The software is really worrying, and this is one reason why.

Risk prediction for suicide is really hard. Currently the risk prediction
tools (created and used by health care professionals) are bad, and there's
strong advice that these should not be used to predict future suicide or self
harm, and should not be used to determine who to offer treatment to or who to
discharge from treatment. And these tools are somewhat more sophisticated than
"has the person used the word suicide?"

[https://www.nice.org.uk/donotdo/do-not-use-risk-
assessment-t...](https://www.nice.org.uk/donotdo/do-not-use-risk-assessment-
tools-and-scales-to-predict-future-suicide-or-repetition-of-selfharm)

[https://www.nice.org.uk/donotdo/do-not-use-risk-
assessment-t...](https://www.nice.org.uk/donotdo/do-not-use-risk-assessment-
tools-and-scales-to-determine-who-should-and-should-not-be-offered-treatment-
or-who-should-be-discharged)

~~~
analog31
In my view a serious problem is that a person becomes "labeled" as a suicide
risk, and has to bear that cross for the rest of their lives. It could get you
kicked out of school, barred from employment, and so forth.

------
UnFleshedOne
I wonder what can parents do to prepare kids for that -- teach them to never
post anything personal where school could be watching (so nowhere), create a
fake public persona to avoid closer scrutiny, and so on?

Schools will prepare students for accepting global surveillance and to
counteract that parents will prepare kids for living in cyberpunk underground.
I don't think either of those extremes are good for the kids themselves...

~~~
RealStickman
Honestly, I'd flood their system with words, phrases and various images from
the internet.

------
cproctor
So much for education for democratic citizenship.

Someday I will help lead a school whose software is written by students and
whose policies are debated by student government, faculty senate, and the PTA.

------
turc1656
This is so utterly horrifying I can't even put into words my disgust.
Although, I probably should have seen it coming.

How do the schools and Gaggle have access to all of this info anyway? I assume
they have school accounts that are provided by the school and therefore the
legal property of the school since they are the ones paying for the MSFT 365
accounts? But what about Gmail? I don't use it but I thought it was free? I
take it there is some corporate version that is paid for?

~~~
aidenn0
[https://edu.google.com/why-google/k-12-solutions](https://edu.google.com/why-
google/k-12-solutions)

------
rdiddly
Profiting off of fear-mongering. But I suppose there's a certain amount of
sales genius (albeit evil) in manipulating faint-hearted administrators to buy
your product.

They need to add things like _going outside, storm, thunder, lightning,
raincoat_ and so forth to the list, since getting struck by lightning is about
600 times more likely nationwide than being shot at school.

~~~
ahaferburg
Lightning doesn't make global news.

~~~
rdiddly
Right, because, I suppose, it's 600X more commonplace than school shootings!

So, we're paying close attention to exotic scenarios we'll likely never
experience personally, and getting worked up over them. Meanwhile the various
elephants in our rooms, the ones that are likely to be actual problems for us
(heart disease, dying in a car crash, cancer, etc.) are drab and gray, so we
ignore them. I mean who wants to solve real problems? BORRINGGG!

Suddenly just now while typing I realized that 1) an exotic, unlikely scenario
2) that we engage closely with ...is precisely the paradigm of all fiction,
fantasy and entertainment. What is a video game other than an exotic scenario
you'll probably never experience in real life, that you engage with and try to
"get into?"

How about in ancient times? Sure - even back in Greece or in Shakespeare's
time, "the play was the thing," namely an exotic scenario (the inside of the
royal castle perhaps, which most people will never see) and "getting worked up
over it" might be more aptly described by your drama teacher as sharing in the
tension, drama and catharsis.

Even our ideas about the future tend to center around exotic utopias, or
exotic apocalypses (the writer John Michael Greer has talked about this)
whereas in reality things will probably just continue to slowly get shittier,
more annoying, less comfortable, less convenient etc., and ironically it'll
probably be that way precisely because we've got our heads up our asses with
fantasy (including things like "Hey there was a shooting; let's implement
1984.") and can't seem to reach a basic consensus about what reality is and
how to keep our house in order. BORRINGGG!!!

Anyway if we're using news of a school shooting as entertainment -- "Riveting
tension!" says the New York Times. "So sad!" says the Washington Post -- then
suddenly instead of a fictional universe with actors, we're using real people,
real victims, for our entertainment. Which feels like a wrong to me.

Huge tangent, sorry. Didn't expect to be writing in this direction today.

------
pergadad
A really sad state of affairs when we are monitoring all our children's
communications. Its the same as those parents installing spyware on their
kids' devices: an attempt to alleviate the symptoms, rather than the causes:
loneliness, lack of attention, lack of parenting skills, poverty, lack of
funds for good teachers, ...

------
MikeGale
I find it interesting how this sort of thing is spreading so far.

The CCP state, Facebook, Google... now Gaggle.

I hope there's some studies of the damage such things do to people.

 __How much do they lose the ability to control their own lives? __

 __How does this change their attitude to other people? __

 __Respect for authority? __

Most of all, this ought to be __opt-in __, opt-in only, and if you opted-in
you can get out again. My reading of the articles says it 's none of these.

------
TurkishPoptart
It would be great if a hacker could get this system to create a bunch of false
positives to the extent that the schools could no longer justify the $60k
price tag on this. Also, isn't that enough money to hire an additional school
psychologist? This is not a problem software can fix.

------
llsf
This is awful. Privacy should be a fundamental right.

But I cannot help thinking of my younger self, toying with that Gaggle AI :) I
mean as a teenager (old enough here to have been through the "no-future" 80's)
me and my friends would have push that Gaggle AI, where no AI has gone before
:)

What can they do to the kids who write "inappropriate" stuff ? They cannot
prevent the kids to do it again, it is free speech during private
conversations.

This reminds me and my cousin who created a secret language "fefe" that easy
enough to process and speak, but too confusing to understand when listen too.
Kids are going to just do that, new words or old ones with new meaning, and
challenge Gaggle.

~~~
zucker42
They say it's AI but it seems like just a hash map to me.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Most AI seems to be either that, human workers pretending to be AI, or some
half-baked, misapplied and not working deep neural network. I have a huge
respect for companies that know about linear regression.

------
nloladze
How is this legal? I'm not doubting the school's intentions but this is a
massive breach of privacy, a sort of dystopic 1984 scenario.

"Believe happy thoughts! You are happy! Smile please!"

I think the solution lies outside the tech world and in face to face
solutions; train teachers to spot problems and red flags and possibly have a
tally system. Are several teachers reporting issues? A student missing
classes, showing up long sleeves, withdrawn, depressed? Grades slipping,
unable to focus? Set a counsel meeting and get to the bottom of it.

An abstract and mind-you poorly run AI is just a nightmare scenario. I feel
sorry for any students going through the system now.

~~~
vageli
> How is this legal? I'm not doubting the school's intentions but this is a
> massive breach of privacy, a sort of dystopic 1984 scenario.

You might also be surprised to know that your employer can also log everything
you do with company property. Not that I agree with it but the legal precedent
is there and children in school have far fewer rights than others.

------
toss1
>>student emails are scanned in real time, and those that violate the rules
are blocked from their intended recipients.

Aside from the massive overriding issues of such pervasive surveillance, this
practice seems additionally stupid and counterproductive.

As soon as kids figure out that their language is being monitored for certain
phrases -- and this is an instant give-away -- they'll simply avoid using
those phrases and develop a new code, rendering the entire system useless (as
well as abhorrent).

Gaggle's mgt are clearly not the sharpest tools in the shed, making this kind
of basic and stupid opsec errors...

------
iamleppert
Back when I was in school, they had a software called “Foolproof” installed on
all the computers that largely did the same thing. In addition to that it
prevented system-level changes to the computers and crippled them in other
ways, like preventing installation of applications and hooking into Windows to
implement all sorts of restrictions. It also did content monitoring and would
regularly take screenshots of whatever you were doing.

However, the software was poorly written, full of bugs, would frequently
crash, and generally ineffective. It wasn’t long until we (kids) figured out
its weaknesses and we had full control of it —- we could force it to crash,
uninstall it, and we even took over it’s command and control server.

Mind you, this was 20 years ago. Today’s kids are up against more mature
software but I tend to feel whoever makes these things is generally bottom of
the barrel outsourced devshops, so it’s probably all still very low quality.
Couple that with kids being generally more tech savvy and advanced these days
with clueless school administrators —- kids are generally smarter than you
think and need a lot less protecting. Information spreads at lightning speed
in a school. I’m sure they all know all about this software and how to get
around it.

------
miki123211
> “[There’s] a very consistent and long-standing belief that children have
> fewer rights to their own communications, and to their own inner thoughts
> and to their own practices,”

IMO, that's the biggest problem here. Until we stop treating children the way
we treated slaves, people of cololor, women and LGBTQ+ in the past, we will
get horrible systems like this. We need to recognize that "it is self-evident
that all people are created equal", and that includes children too.

I'm a pretty young user by HN standards and I still keep in touch with
under18s. I know a few who have been surveilled at every step and prohibited
from using most modern technologies like other teenagers do. This created way
more problems than it solved. This was particularly prevalent in the U.S. On
the other hand, I never had any rules imposed, and I think I'm in tech only
because of that. In Poland where I live, monitoring children's use of
technology is almost unheard of. I haven't really heard of any problematic
situations that monitoring would solve. On the other hand, I know a few horror
stories from the U.S. where monitoring was used.

------
Silhouette
One of these days, someone is going to suggest the radical idea that there
might be some connection between

(a) a culture of authority and draconian measures where adolescents aren't
respected and the very people who are supposed to look after them and set an
example are instead their enemies and not to be trusted

and

(b) a culture where significant numbers of adolescents think it's OK to commit
extreme acts that harm themselves or others.

~~~
swasheck
dont tell them that they're the problem, because they (and their investors)
are making loads of money on positioning themselves as the "solution."

------
zaptheimpaler
Its part of a broader pattern of factory-lining everything in the
industrialized world. Any solution that is not codified into a law or
structure of some kind is "illegible" to those who only see structures.

Who needs social structures when you can just outsource every problem to a
company and throw the ones that don't fit into some variant of prison or
mental ward?

------
decasteve
When I was going through school I was taught that this is the sort of thing
that happens in the GDR--the surveillance state. We watched
videos/documentaries on this. These are the tools of totalitarian states is
what we were taught. The technology has changed but the end result hasn't--
it's still chilling.

This has come up for my family this past week. When my son came home from
school and said he feels uncomfortable with all of the video cameras in the
hallways I was shocked that this was a thing. He said he even felt
uncomfortable going to the washrooms as he couldn't be sure there weren't
cameras.

The measures of surveillance employed without notifying the parents was
shocking to me--with no option to give feedback or opt out? I haven't even
looked into other forms of monitoring like what's shared in the article. But
I'm going to find out.

------
consentfactory
While Gaggle is indeed crazy intrusive, they're not really alone in this world
of K12 monitoring. GoGuardian and Lightspeed Systems are doing the same thing,
perhaps to a lesser degree, but maybe not.

For example, administrators using GoGuardian can get 'Smart Alerts' for 'self-
harm' and other objectionable material. They'll receive an email that includes
a screenshot of the material in question, and for G Suite, it spans Google
search, Docs, and effectively any Google service.

However, that said, I just tried to pull up a link for GoGuardian and noticed
they have this disclaimer:

"Please note: Smart Alerts for the "Self-Harm" category is no longer available
for new customers. For more information, please reach out to your sales
representative."

------
btrettel
My high school gave all students Gaggle email addresses 10-15 years ago. The
account was used as part of an assignment in a computer class to send some
emails, though I think the teachers expected you to continue using the account
for personal things. I don't recall being told the account was being watched
by anyone. Makes me glad I never used it for anything beyond the assignment.

Incidentally, over the past few years I've been doing an audit of my password
manager and couldn't log into the Gaggle account any longer, so I suppose the
addresses are deleted after a few years. Hopefully that's current policy as
well as I think most people would agree that what you write as a teenager may
not reflect well on you later.

------
bensonn
I am a childless tin-foil hatter so I am asking out of ignorant curiosity- is
there any way to avoid tracking on your child? Does refusing to agree to
Google/Gaggles/MS/Etc's ToS, EULA or Privacy policy mean the public schools
can refuse your child education? Is there some different ToS and privacy
policy for minors forced into using these services?

I also feel like this CYA policy may backfire. Before they could rightfully
say they weren't the responsible party. Now that they are using tax payer
funds to "prevent" these things I feel like they put themselves in a position
to be responsible if it fails. I am sure there is some legal doctrine term for
what I am trying to say.

~~~
vageli
> I am a childless tin-foil hatter so I am asking out of ignorant curiosity-
> is there any way to avoid tracking on your child? Does refusing to agree to
> Google/Gaggles/MS/Etc's ToS, EULA or Privacy policy mean the public schools
> can refuse your child education? Is there some different ToS and privacy
> policy for minors forced into using these services?

> I also feel like this CYA policy may backfire. Before they could rightfully
> say they weren't the responsible party. Now that they are using tax payer
> funds to "prevent" these things I feel like they put themselves in a
> position to be responsible if it fails. I am sure there is some legal
> doctrine term for what I am trying to say.

This is a really interesting perspective and I'm curious if someone
knowledgeable on the subject would comment. If public education is a right,
can my child be denied that right if I refuse to consent to a license? If the
child consents, is that not an invalid contract?

------
chiefalchemist
Two brief thoughts

1) This is no way to treat kids that are already suffering from a
dysfunctional society created by adults.

2) Even worse, to these kids, this is only going to normalize the idea of the
surveillance state. But maybe that's the point.

------
Ididntdothis
This feels like an extension of how the work world is being run increasingly.
More and more process, policies and automated decisions and less common sense.
Good to teach children as early as possible to fall in line :(

------
milofeynman
> Gaggle touts itself as a tantalizingly simple solution to a diverse set of
> horrors. It claims to have saved hundreds of lives from suicide during the
> 2018–19 school year.

I just read a great newyorker piece on a security company that sold FUD[0].
This seems like another example of FUD for sale very similar to some security
companies out there.

[0]
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/04/a-cybersecurit...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/04/a-cybersecurity-
firms-sharp-rise-and-stunning-collapse)

------
quadrifoliate
Somewhat of a tangent, but I can't help thinking about it – since workplace
surveillance has now _also_ been normalized in the US, four years of college
might be the only place where young American adults will have the ability to
be exposed to a place where they can say or do anything on the Internet
without Big Brother looking over their shoulder.

I'm assuming that most progressive college campuses don't use these
ridiculously invasive tools (the college I went to ran a fairly unrestricted
internal and guest network), but perhaps that's being too optimistic.

------
jrd259
Note the politics of funding such surveillance as a justification for not
needing to restrict access to weapons.

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norgate
Ethics and privacy rights notwithstanding, how can we help to educate schools
that software like Gaggle are more fraudulent than they are helpful? It's
quite clear to me all this product is doing is maintaining a blacklist
controversial words and flagging any content that is passed through it that
contains them, and is calling this AI to make it sound more advanced than it
is. False advertisement to a community that is generally not very tech savvy.
Are parents and schoolboards really comfortable with $10/hour contract
employees looking through their children's content to decide its obscenity?
With the money these school districts spend on scammy software, they could be
spending it on recruiting health experts. I'm confident this company justifies
its product's existence by taking a secondary school kid's joke about killing
himself or herself out of context, flagging it, and claiming they prevented a
suicide to boost their metrics.

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mixmastamyk
I was not happy to learn recently our school was using google sites and
chromebooks. We weren’t asked or even notified about that. Gaggle is another
large step in the wrong direction.

All demonstrating that school (and govt) officials are not even aware of the
need for privacy.

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danharaj
Foucault was astute in observing that schools mirror the architecture and
processes of prisons.

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annoyingnoob
This is completely unnecessary. Has our world really come to a complete
dragnet? Anything in the name of safety? Innocent as long as you keep proving
yourself innocent. This is no longer the land of the free and the home of the
brave.

Let the kids be kids.

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throwaheyy
Seeing this headline reminded me of that Lysol TV ad. All sounds like a noble
cause until they briefly mention “and partnering with a smart thermometer
company”. And bam, there’s your kids data being sucked up by medical
company...

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lonelappde
Sex and violence and curse words have never been allowed at school. Kids can
do all these things on their personal Gmail/WhatsApp if they want.

------
markdown
Sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode.

~~~
intolerabletech
Heh, I came here looking for this comment. That's because it literally is!
"Arkangel" follows a very young girl through to young adulthood. When she was
very young, she was part of a pilot program that allowed her mom to see what
she was seeing at all times, filter visual and auditory content, etc.

It went about the way you'd expect.

Bark's response to DHH [1] made me fucking literally nauseous. How detached
from reality do you have to be to not realize the insular effects that this
will have on children? How insulated is one's life that they would be unable
to conceive of the obvious and likely immediate effect these tools will have
on teenagers _who are already struggling with identity and discovery_?!

Can't wait until Bark announces the feature where they'll mail you weekly to
tell you if your kid is likely to be gay (which as any LGBT person on social
media will tell you, is incredibly easy. Facebook has been accidentally
outting people via association for a decade or more, and I can't imagine how
that is amplified with full access to the screen, messages, raw data.) Just
disgusting.

[1]:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/brandonhilkert/status/11892177623...](https://mobile.twitter.com/brandonhilkert/status/1189217762335432715)

EDIT: Also, wow, he's really trying to drop "prevented" statistics in another
Twitter thread. IT's not even impressive. You're monitoring 50M students and
have only caught 320-some predators despite pervasive constant monitoring? I
don't even find that impressive.

The testimonies too, HOW IS THIS REAL -- _" I only get notifications if there
are items of concern (sex, depression, bullying, profanity, etc.) Totally
worth it!" -Bark Mom_

~~~
intolerabletech
I can't seem to edit my comment any further (Thanks HN for just returning 200
on the edit and trashing the content of my update! This is the third time I've
typed it, thanks a lot!)

As a last plea, young adults are human beings with autonomy. Trying to
suppress that autonomy has always had the same effect, every generation has
tried.

Meanwhile, I can confidently say that there is a VERY STRONG chance I would
not have made it through high school with pervasive, constant surveillance. An
overly anxious boy coming to terms with his sexuality in god damn Kansas is
hard enough, to think that I would have to worry about every electronic action
being reported to my school or parents probably would've made the thoughts of
suicide unsuppressable and I wouldn't have had the VERY small community that I
sort of accidentally discovered via Facebook, again because there are so many
indicators of someone possibly being LGBT even just from what friends you have
in common, etc.

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meh206
You have to wonder about the slimy people who advocated for and approved this
crap in the school systems. Only in America

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jrochkind1
oh my god what a world.

Basically, this is a scam where a company gets rich by convincing school
districts to abusively surveil their students with no real benefit.

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pbreit
DHH really laid into Bark” this week:
“[https://mobile.twitter.com/dhh/status/1189235145192157184](https://mobile.twitter.com/dhh/status/1189235145192157184)

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amursft
Creepy. Who's working on homeschooling?

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swasheck
but i was just writing a paper on the social impact of Beck's mid-90s hit,
"Loser"

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tapatio
piazzo is doing the same thing.

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JohnClark1337
Have to get them ready for the police state

