> just a central database bringing together data from different government agencies
I realize this is a US perspective, but this actually sets off more alarm bells in my head than a school overreaching by installing spyware. The latter can be addressed by direct parental action pretty easily. Government agencies systematically sharing data is a lot harder to solve and if anything is more dangerous.
Just because a family gets welfare aid from one agency doesn't automatically mean that they want their kid's school to know about it. Maybe they got enough and want their child to not have to feel different from the other kids by getting special treatment at school. Why not just let the family self-report their need to the school?
More alarming is the idea of reporting interactions with police. A conviction is one thing, but an arrest could very easily be a mistake, and propagating that information explicitly in the name of child protection is a recipe for turning that mistake into a tragedy when a school overreacts.
>Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it.
The other red flag is exactly zero examples of how using this data allowed anyone to "safeguard" at-risk youth or to "act quickly" to intervene.
It's profiling, plain and simple. Despite best intentions, it will definitely enable bias (unconscious or not) to be a factor in how children and their families/caregivers are treated.
This is the kind of thing where it might be ask for a panopticon where the parents can see precisely what kind of queries are run on their data, by whom and why, with a time limited ability to keep query data secret for police investigations and such.
Fighting against this type of data sharing on principle will probably fail because there are some legitimate use cases to Keep the Children Safe for this type of data.
It'll be hard, however, to push back a request that all data access requests are logged with justifications because, after all it helps to Keep the Children Safe.
You might also discover that the appetite for this data might wane entirely if they can't access it without being monitored and without having to justify themselves.
I'm curious how well a GDPR challenge would fare. There's specific exemptions around data gathering to detect fraud and to solve crimes, but this database has a lot more detail and the lack of consent from families is concerning.
One of the details mentioned in the article is that the ICO (the UK data protection regulator) has reportedly already given its blessing to what is going on here. That's interesting because it suggests that either the nature of the system and any potential risks it brings are being overstated by its critics or the public service that explicitly exists to regulate such systems isn't effectively limiting the power of the state where it should. Those are very different situations and I don't think there's enough objective information in the article to tell which is happening.
Article 6(1)(e) of the GDPR states that data processing is lawful if it is “necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller.”
I'm sympathetic to this, because my own politics are very libertarian. But recently I've gotten more sensitive to cases where we acknowledge that something is the government's job (e.g. protecting kids from violence), but then we insist that that job should be done poorly. I think this has ripple effects, not only in that the job doesn't get done well, but in the culture of how the government works and who chooses to work in government. It seems like there should be a middle ground where we don't want the government to be responsible for too many things, but we do want it to be good at the things it's responsible for.
>But recently I've gotten more sensitive to cases where we acknowledge that something is the government's job (e.g. protecting kids from violence), but then we insist that that job should be done poorly.
We don't insist they do the job poorly. Instead, we set things up so that they need to cover their own ... asses when they take action. Instead of making a rational decision on a per situation basis, we get things like "0 tolerance" rules; so that the authority figure can say "I was just following the rules". Because if they make a judgement call, SOMEONE will flip out and they'll get fired. And that leads to all kinds of horrible outcomes
- Child brings a plastic knife to school to cut their lunch with, they're suspended because it's a weapon
- Child is attacked by a bully and is suspended, because they were involved in a fight
Adding information gathering systems that will quickly wind up being abused, but have very little possibly positive value... doesn't help with what's currently wrong with the system.
Yep. I wrote a longer comment elsewhere in this thread so I won't repeat myself, but I think people attributing this to just surveillance obsession and nosiness are a little off the mark. If anything I would say the public have to share a fair bit of the blame here - there are constant demands that the public sector Do Something to Protect Our Children from abuse (independent of any statistics on frequency and whether the Something actually reduces it) which leads to an overzealous obsession with Safeguarding, and then teachers are trained to err on the side of oversuspicion, and know they may be raked over the coals if they fail to report when in doubt. So I'm afraid to say this is what a significant amount of the public demanded
Sometimes we don’t use every possible tool for every problem, particularly when the mass externalities may be worse than the individual outcome.
An extreme example is nuclear weapons. You can win any single battle with nuclear weapons. But the world will end. Probably better to slog through trenches, and do the job “poorly”.
Labeling kids based of family situation will indelibly make their situations define them. Many kids living in dysfunction go to school as a refuge from their life. School administrators aren’t social workers, and aren’t in a position to provide psychological and social assistance to kids who need it. A lack of funding for those services doesn’t mean you offload the work to functionaries at the local school. Teachers aren’t trained in these areas either - their forte is education and no matter how much you liked your home room teacher, they weren’t trained in social intervention. But there’s another aspect, around that idea of escape - once you’ve labeled everyone according to their situation, when you walk in the room, you have to assume everyone knows. You can’t let your life at home disappear any more. And not everyone who has access to the information will use it in a caring unbiased way. Many people will see a kid who has various labels of dysfunction associated with them as broken, needing special education, judge outbursts or misbehavior more harshly than an unlabeled kid.
Finally, the entire point outlined in the article was to use information about their situation to flag unknown problems. Just because someone is on social welfare or a family member has a mental health issue, or even a parent is in prison, doesn’t mean they’re being sexually abused or whatever. However by labeling them administrators are explicitly intended to use the label to assume a likelihood of previously unreported abuse.
Many parents are accused falsely of abuse or neglect for normal childhood injuries. They go through the trials of the damned to get their kids back and fend off criminal charges, and criminal charges are indelible on your record and show up in background checks even if you’re found innocent.
So - yes, mass surveillance would likely catch more criminals. But it will also criminalize everyone, and punish many that are innocent. It’s better to disarm and slog through the trenches - and maybe actually fund social workers rather than surveillance startups - than descend into this morass.
"but then we insist that that job should be done poorly."
Where is that being insisted? Also, what is the bar for "poorly"? After all, were talking about the government, which does many things poorly despite massive budgets, extensive power, etc.
But social care agencies have a serious problem. They don't take good care of kids, which leads to them having a very bad reputation, which leads to child abuse (and many other crimes) not getting reported. Why? Simple: kids are treated far worse "in the system" than at home, even in abuse situations.
But if CPS doesn't get kids reported, they don't get money.
They don't want to fix this by taking better care of kids (“generational squeeze” on public finances, as the article puts it), so they must find other solutions. And the solutions they're going with are simple: get everyone to report everything on kids, in a format that can be easily used in court.
In 6 months, expect a message that a teacher got beaten up for, probably unknowingly, causing a kid to be forcibly placed into "care".
I realize this is a US perspective, but this actually sets off more alarm bells in my head than a school overreaching by installing spyware. The latter can be addressed by direct parental action pretty easily. Government agencies systematically sharing data is a lot harder to solve and if anything is more dangerous.
Just because a family gets welfare aid from one agency doesn't automatically mean that they want their kid's school to know about it. Maybe they got enough and want their child to not have to feel different from the other kids by getting special treatment at school. Why not just let the family self-report their need to the school?
More alarming is the idea of reporting interactions with police. A conviction is one thing, but an arrest could very easily be a mistake, and propagating that information explicitly in the name of child protection is a recipe for turning that mistake into a tragedy when a school overreacts.