
Schools are using unproven surveillance technology to monitor students - howard941
https://features.propublica.org/aggression-detector/the-unproven-invasive-surveillance-technology-schools-are-using-to-monitor-students/
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threwawasy1228
When I was in school they would monitor everything that you did on the
computer and then when the students attempted to get around the blocks with
simple proxies, they would have to get new proxies each day as they were
banned.

I personally was one of the people who was supplying new proxies to students
at the school, and they went after me taking away my ability to connect to the
internet using my login for the remaining years of my high school experience.
I eventually had to use other peoples logins (with their permission of course)
to be able to continue using the computers at the school.

All this is to say, if you try to create a surveillance system at any given
school, kids will find a way to not engage with it or fight back if they are
able. People in the discussion below aren't giving the kids enough credit to
stand up for themselves.

~~~
sandworm101
Yes but cameras and microphones are different than network monitoring. The
monitoring of computers is individualized, whereas cameras monitor groups. It
might seem minor to some, but the presence of cameras in british schools is
really changing things for the good.

American schools use cameras to look into crimes. They are not generally
accessible immediately by teachers, but many British schools now have very
elaborate camera systems designed for immediate use. When two kids get into a
fight there is little debate about who started it. Teachers can, within
minutes, have the footage on a tablet at their desk. Having that unbiased
video evidence immediately at hand radically changes bullying prevention. Some
kids and most parents may not like cameras, but that kid who is afraid for his
or her physical safety wants those cameras working.

Microphones are a more sensitive issue, but I could see them being equally
effective in addressing harassment. They would need different protections,
perhaps a 30min recording limit, but there is potential.

~~~
fiblye
Honest question: since you think absolute surveillance in schools is
beneficial, what about society at large? Should we have cameras in every
possible corner of the world as a crime deterrent? If not, what should be the
cutoff? Schools only? All places with a high density of kids?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
People want safety. There are multiple ways to achieve that, electronic
surveillance is just a lazy/economical way of doing it with a not
insignificant civil liberty cost. If you aren’t being hurt, you might think
that cost is too great, if you are being hurt, you won’t.

So I guess as a society, we should try to provide safety, and if surveillance
isn’t desirable, we have to be willing to pay higher costs for another
solution (eg fewer students per class so teachers can pay attention to
bullying).

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dgzl
This was being praised on NPR recently. The young host was ecstatically
talking about how the CEO of some company says "we kinda gave up our rights to
privacy with the digital age", and that these surveillance measures are able
to spot trouble students.

The host then talked himself into making the comparison between this activity
and how Russia treats surveillance, and confusedly asking his guest "wait,
we're not like the Russians are we? That can't be right..." After some
interaction, the host was eager to talk about the programs again.

Why are people so willing to give up their rights?

~~~
userbinator
_Why are people so willing to give up their rights?_

A lot of people are very happy to lead docile, ignorant lives, and be
"protected" from any (real or imagined) threats. I think it's mostly a "I'm
not doing anything wrong, why should I care?" type of thinking. As the
infamous saying goes,

"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

~~~
godelski
> I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?

I always hate this, because we've seen all throughout history that legal wrong
and moral wrong are different things. You can do something that is legally
wrong and morally right. Lots of laws change for this reason. It is no longer
illegal to have an interracial marriage. Or a gay marriage. I think part of
this thinking is "we've come so far" but people don't realize those things
weren't that long ago and similar things are happening today.

~~~
leereeves
And people's definition of morally wrong also differs.

Even if the people in power now consider everything you're doing both morally
and legally right, that could change when power changes hands, and the system
you once supported can be turned against you.

------
JetezLeLogin
All this - being spied on 100% of the time - ostensibly to prevent something
that has about a 1 in 600,000,000 chance of happening to you, ever. Oh but it
must be a real and ever-present danger - I saw it on the news!

By that logic we should have facial recognition too, just to make sure JLo
doesn't walk in. _She 's been all over the news for 20 years, so it must be an
epidemic._

The critique in this article focuses on technological unreliability without
addressing the profound wrongheadedness of the idea in the first place.
Perhaps that's been discussed plenty elsewhere, but I for one could stand to
have that part of the critique repeated ad infinitum until it sinks in.

~~~
bagels
The probability is orders of magnitude larger than this.

[https://medium.com/@hellodonavon/what-are-the-chances-of-
you...](https://medium.com/@hellodonavon/what-are-the-chances-of-your-child-
being-in-a-school-shooting-df2073f8b86b)

~~~
lonelappde
1.5% lifetime chance of attending a school with a shooting. that's a super
wide net. We almost all have friends who have been murdered or died in car
accidents or cancer. 1.5% of merely knowing someone in a school shooting is
tiny.

~~~
bagels
1/600,000,000 was made up and wrong, sorry

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adamnemecek
US students (general population as well) are way more stressed than students
in other countries. Like way, way, way more stressed.

People respond to prolonged stress with aggression. Instead of doing
surveillance, maybe think about ways to reduce student stress.

E.g. in Austria, the school is legally required to provide a day between two
major tests (IIRC). In the US, lol, finals are crammed into like 3 days where
you have major papers/projects due as well, so like 6 major things due in like
3 days is normal.

Maybe school is just supposed to prepare from being managed inefficiently.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
The culture in many US schools is an adversarial mess where the teachers,
administration, and students are in constant conflict over things that should
be non-issues. There's often a sense that the primary purpose of school is to
grind down any resistance to authority. Comparisons between school and prison
aren't typical, but they're certainly not unheard of. Some schools have been
known to lock/chain all side/rear exits during the school day to stop students
from sneaking out (generally in blatant violation of fire code). Multiple
school districts have had to settle lawsuits related to students being strip-
searched.

In this culture the kind of system described by the article wasn't just
predictable, it was utterly inevitable.

~~~
noodlesUK
There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young
people have no longer got any rights. For most cases your barometer for
treating children ought to be “would I as an adult be okay being treated this
way”. Children need more protection than adults, not less. Schools should be a
place where children feel safe, not a place where they feel locked up. It’s no
surprise that there’s a school-to-prison pipeline in the US when some schools
resemble prisons so closely.

~~~
qball
>There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young
people have no longer got any rights.

Segregation happened. Much like racial divides, it's easier to see people you
aren't exposed to on a daily basis as something less than human. That, and
when people are expected to be less than human, they start acting like it (the
lack of opportunity for personal development directly delays when it happens).

Children, of course, have it worse, because they don't know (and some never
really figure it out) that they're getting screwed; the foundation of fighting
for rights is knowing you should have them in the first place.

And while there may have been a good reason for this in the past (1910s
industry was very far from being a pleasant place to work), safety regulations
and the increased number of service/knowledge jobs relative to the more
unpleasant ones (as well as safety regulations where applicable) as well as
increased automation would make workplace apprenticeship programs much more
viable. The political will (of the people who have rights) can't be changed
unless they see those who they oppress like themselves, and showing that they
can accomplish objectively useful things (not schoolwork) is a good way to do
that.

Of course, the very task of creating programs that make children useful is
significant, and we figure that school isn't _that_ unpleasant for most, so
[corporate humanity] will do nothing to change their status. We won't teach
the children dissatisfied by the current system that there's something they
can do about it either, because that would destabilize the system as it
stands.

>Schools should be a place where children feel safe, not a place where they
feel locked up.

The two are much more similar than you realize. The feeling of being locked up
directly stems from the complete elimination of risk (i.e. the feeling of
safety). And a school with no playground and no technical subjects where
students are seen and not heard is a perfectly safe place, much like societies
where the concept of risk is antithetical to the concept that individuals only
exist to serve said society tend to have less violence but never actually
prosper. Development requires risk.

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0xcde4c3db
> Asked whether his algorithms could prevent a mass shooting, van der Vorst
> said: “I wouldn’t claim that we could prevent a crazy loony from shooting
> people.”

Call me a crazy loony, but I think someone who would phrase it that way isn't
on the same planet as taking the problem space seriously.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
It seems to be working. The sane people have stopped shooting up groups of
strangers and now only the crazy loonies are left, as one can plainly see from
their interviews, social media posts etc

~~~
craftyguy
I don't think that's the point. The person in the quote probably has no idea
what motivates people to do this, and they clearly have no desire to want to
understand it if they're quick to dismiss them as 'crazy loonies' (hint:
understanding motivation, etc is key to prevention, not "identifying all the
loonies" or whatever they seem to be suggesting..)

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b_tterc_p
While the cameras in the article seem to run on some stupid software that
doesn’t help, I don’t think I would have cared as a student about cameras in
general. In fact I may have appreciated the fact that cameras mean the
teachers can’t get away with the privilege of being more trustworthy than the
kids.

Catching cheaters would be nice. Catching bullies would be nice. Reducing the
rate of false sexual assault claims and actual sexual assault (my year had one
of each teacher:student).

But... it probably opens doors to worse things. Dumb cameras would be good.
Smart cameras would be bad. As would software run over the dumb cameras.

~~~
tsss
You seriously believe there wouldn't have been a "technical problem" if it
saves the teachers or school some trouble?

~~~
metildaa
When teachers and administrators are the only one with access to the camera
system, they can choose to look the other way and use the panopticon of
surveillance only on the students.

Meanwhile, the disempowered students can complain all they want, which will
just encourage administrators to crack down more using their new camera
system.

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phpdragon
As a former teacher I 100% support surveillance (hopefully video) monitoring
in the classroom. Parents need to see first-hand how bad student behavior can
get.

~~~
arkades
In both directions.

The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but
no one took kids at face value.

Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in
every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No
one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets
what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't
comprehend it at the time.

~~~
wildrhythms
I'm curious, did you attend a large(ish) school or a smaller school?

I attended what most people would consider a "small" public high school in the
U.S. (rural area, less than 1,000 students, one high school for the entire
county), and never experienced anything like what you're describing.

Teachers knew students by name (given the smaller size of their classes; for
example, there was one band teacher for the entire school), as well as
students' parents by name.

~~~
AnaniasAnanas
The schools that I went to had around 300 students. It did not stop the abuse
by teachers nor did it stop the bullying that the teachers ignored.

~~~
rndgermandude
I never experienced or observed bad bullying or even physical violence (except
for some minor skirmishes, usually between friends) during my school years.

We surely had our share of social awkward people, but they were left alone
unless they themselves acted out, and they usually still made some friends.

We didn't have true bullies. Maybe occasionally somebody from a higher grade
would tease somebody younger, but never for long let alone repeatedly. Beating
somebody up would have been a great crime worthy of grave penalties in our
eyes, and we would have stopped it and then have ratted out whoever it was in
a heartbeat. If somebody tried to bully somebody beyond what we considered
acceptable teasing or be aggessive to somebody, the class mates would protect
whoever it was, even the social awkward kid. This only happened once in my
peer group with a dude who had freshly transferred from another school (moved
cities IIRC) trying to be the "cool" guy picking on an awkward kid, starting
to slap him. He quickly learned that if you want to bully or fight one of us,
you will fight all of us. Forming a crowd around him telling him to leave his
victim alone, fuck off and never try it again with anybody was enough. A few
years later we were buddies with him.

There were some students who gave teachers a somewhat hard time, but mostly
"class jokers" who probably suffered from ADHD. I only ever had one class mate
who posed such a problem the teachers could not handle her within our school.
She was then sent off to a special care place specializing in teens with her
kinds of problems, not as a punishment or some bullshit "zero tolerance"
policy but to help her.

This is of course just my personal experience in the two schools I personally
visited, but it makes me genuinely wonder how the dynamics in a school can
change and deteriorate to a point where constant bullying and even beat ups
are tolerated and common (whether it be due to obliviousness or fear). But I
know it happens, and happens a lot.

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bin0
This is a crazy idea. Even if they worked, this would be a bad one. Most kids
who get angry and aggressive never shoot up a school over it, and all this
will result in is a bunch of kids who get in arguments being hauled in front
of the cops and being interrogated about "where is the gun, and what day are
you doing it?".

This applies to the whole "report suspicious behavior" thing too. Most of the
time, when a kid is acting like an edgy teen he's just... being an edgy teen.
I don't like the whole spanish inquisition rat-out-your-buddy direction this
thing is taking.

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apo
It's a little surprising that this article approaches the issue from the
perspective of the gizmo working, rather than ever-widening surveillance.

Imagine that some automated surveillance technology proved itself to be 100%
effective at spotting aggressive behavior. The only catch is that it records,
with perfect fidelity every sneeze, cough, conversation, and laugh in a way
that uniquely associates each instance to an individual. Part of the efficacy
requires all audio and personal identification to be stored in a giant
database.

Should such a technology be deployed in US public schools?

~~~
astazangasta
No. Surveillance is a bad by itself. I don't want a social model where
morality is the product of fear. I don't believe in authoritarian virtues;
they will inherently lead to aggression and violence themselves.

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thoughtstheseus
What if a kid does not want to be constantly recorded?

~~~
qball
Who cares what unpersons think?

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atoav
As a sidenote, most surveillance technology is _unproven_ , at least in the
sense — that there is no good scientific proof for increased security by using
it.

I believe most surveillance tecchnology is better suited for ass
covering/acountability than for any real increase of security and safety.

This is the difference between stopping something from happening vs figuring
out afterwards what caused it.

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TazeTSchnitzel
You could prevent actual shootings for a lot less money by sending out a
letter to parents asking about how secure their guns at home are.

~~~
celeritascelery
Are most school shootings by fellow students? I was under the impression that
was not the case.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It seems like a lot are:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States)

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ddingus
All I know is I would very likely be in jail in the school environment today.

How did it get so damn authoritarian?

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Nasrudith
One thing I don't get is why the hell so many people's definition of 'good
child development' involves setting up dystopias that only a few decades ago
would have been panned as heavy handed and unrealistic.

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olodus
It isn't very weird that these smart surveillance thingys go off on the wrong
things. What do they have to train those AI? They can't have that many "sound
bites" from actual school shootings right? Maybe they actually have some but
probably not enough to train a reliable AI on imo. I wonder how they did to
create more data. Did they hire some actors and tried to create some
"aggressive noises" themselves? I really wanted the journalists to ask the
companies this.

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Evidlo
Most people only attend a single high school. What qualifies anyone to speak
about how most US schools are, much less compare student experience between US
and European ones?

There's too many comments here that are just conjecture.

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bombom
In my school they also monitor everything.. so that's not a new thing.

