Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

https://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25919951&bcid=25919951&rssid=25919941&item=http%3a%2f%2fapi.edweek.org%2fv1%2few%2f%3fuuid%3d8805A088-82E5-11E9-B21E-B4F258D98AAA

by johnny313 • 7 years ago

175 178 7 years ago

mobile.edweek.org

SolaceQuantum• 7 years ago

"The local Brazosport Independent School District had recently hired a company called Social Sentinel to monitor public posts from all users, including adults, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The company's algorithms flagged Lafrenais's tweet as a potential threat. Automated alerts were sent to the district's superintendent, chief of police, director of student services, and director of guidance. All told, nearly 140 such alerts were delivered to Brazosport officials during the first eight months of this school year..."

OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations.

xfitm33• 7 years ago

I'm speechless. This is egregious and unacceptable. I'm thankful this kind of stuff didnt exist when I grew up.

Maximus90002• 7 years ago

I'm thankful this kind of stuff didnt exist when I grew up.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard an adult say this phrase lately, I'd be rich! Did adults used to say this phrase 30 years ago? What are we doing to ourselves and our kids?

dsfyu404ed4• 7 years ago

This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations.

The kind of school districts implementing these systems are likely districts with a lot of pro-authoritarian people or at least those kind of people hold a lot of key positions. While it may not be the primary goal, as far as these types of people generally care acclimating children to big-brother is either harmless or a side benefit.

neuralRiot• 7 years ago

The primary goal is to "Do something about it" it doesn't matter if it works or not, same as in defense, if you company can develop an attractive enough product to secure a contract you're set, again it doesnt really matter if it does what it's supposed to do.

momokoko2• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, it's pick one.

Either:

1. Allow for potential bullying and sexual harassment and other things kids put each other through.

2. Monitor every single thing they do and police them at all times.

We as a society need to make a choice. You cannot have a perfectly safe and positive environment at all times for children(and adults) without constant and detailed monitoring.

My guess is that the correct answer lies somewhere in the middle. Ignoring that reality and avoiding handling this at the regulatory level will result in groups going either all the way to one side or all the way to the other.

Edit: I'm shocked how insane and unrealistic the people downvoting this are. I feel so unbelievably bad if any of you have children or vote on any policy that has to do with children. Awful people. Just awful.

JoeAltmaier2• 7 years ago

Its popular to create false dichotomies. Like this one.

How about: monitor them sometimes and train them into good behavior patterns, so as to create a population of civil citizens

You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance. Like any civil society.

BlackRing• 7 years ago

As hyperbolic as this is, I agree with it. There's no need to constantly monitor people like this and it's realistically "big brother-ish" to do so.

What society, parenting, and/or schooling has failed to catch up with is the increasing pace of technological use by adolescents. No one's set proper societal or social guidelines for it, and the schools themselves haven't a solution/educational program outlining it either. Teaching people how to properly behave hasn't been explicitly stated as an area people need to include. They think that phone, or laptop, or tablet is just a black hole and that it's not "real life" or that another person isn't at the other end of it.

And I'm not talking about online shitposting, extreme satire, or any other elements of actual freedom of expression that may be offensive, but the reality and effects of bullying.

It's a 19th century problem people are trying to correct with 21st century tech, when it's anything but. It's a societal issue, or at work we call them "HR issues".

All this tech is going to accomplish is acclimate students to being watched all the time, and that's not a place I want to live in.

jdietrich4• 7 years ago

I'm shocked how insane and unrealistic the people downvoting this are. I feel so unbelievably bad if any of you have children or vote on any policy that has to do with children. Awful people. Just awful.

If you see people disagree with your opinion and conclude that they're awful people who are unfit to vote or raise children, you might want to spend some time reflecting on whether you're being reasonable.

manfredo2• 7 years ago

Or 3. don't monitor anyone, but have mechanisms to report and resolve instances of harassment and bullying. Protection doesn't have to be proactive, it's perfectly fine to be reactive in most circumstances.

philamonster• 7 years ago

Google Apps for Education says hi.

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

There are no ads in G Suite for Education core services, and students’ personal information won’t be used to create ad profiles for targeting.[1]

[1] https://edu.google.com/why-google/privacy-security

GrinningFool3• 7 years ago

    OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the 
    privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our 
    children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian 
    organizations.

If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing.

My advice to my son will be don't use social media; if you must use it, don't post publicly on it. If you must post publicly, know that everything you say will be visible forever to _someone_. And post accordingly.

notathingreally2• 7 years ago

If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing.

But in many cases they weren't. That article talks about taking personal photos off of a student's personal device just because they connected it to a school computer for a short time. It included things like nude photos. Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device. I don't see how anyone can think that's reasonable. Just because I bring a bag with personal letters into the school doesn't mean the school has a right to open those letters, read them, and make Xerox copies of them. It's the same with bringing a personal device to school.

treis3• 7 years ago

OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations.

There's no privacy when you post things publicly on the internet.

homonculus13• 7 years ago

Semantics distract from the point at hand. There's no privacy when you leave your house either, but you still expect people (including school administrators) not to follow you around recording your actions and statements.

There is a reasonable expectation to /not be stalked/ even when conducting yourself in an otherwise public setting. Calling this "privacy" is a loose application of the word, but we never really had the need to come up with another one before the information age made it economical to do this to everyone all the time.

Balgair• 7 years ago

There's no privacy when you post things publicly on the internet.

Though true, there is an important caveat here: These are teenagers. Though their bodies may appear to closer to an adult's than a child's, their brains and expereinces are still only 16 years old. They are still learning. Combine that with Texas' #39 ranking in education [0] and it should come as no suprise that these teenagers are mis-infomed as to what counts and public and what counts as private. Instead of punishment/surveilance, we should perhaps try to teach and be patient.

[0] https://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2019/01/21/texa...

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

There's no privacy when you post things publicly on the internet.

Arguably, making material posted by children on the internet public without approval of a responsible adult should itself be considered a dnagerous privacy violation, given the history of such material being leveraged for cyberstalking and cyberbullying—not exclusively by school administratoes whose zeal exceeds their judgement and competence, but also by other children and by adults other than school administrators—and also those seeking targets to groom for sexual abuse.

jrandm• 7 years ago

I think it's important to distinguish that many of the things being monitored are not being posted publicly. From the article:

In 2016, the company expanded that analysis to students' school email accounts, monitoring all messages sent over district networks.
Gaggle monitors the digital content created by nearly 5 million U.S. K-12 students. That includes all their files, messages, and class assignments created and stored
"opened a Google Doc, wrote down concerns about a boy in class acting strange, then typed every bad word they could think of"

I can see both sides of monitoring school equipment, or at least maintaining the ability to access it, but I don't believe most people here would consent to active content monitoring of every email, document, message, and drafts of documents even on workplace devices

DoubleCribble• 7 years ago

I disagree. The lesson here is: you teach the students how to protect their anonymity. For example, would you ever sign your name to some rude graffiti/foul language you drew in the boys/girls bathroom stall at school? Of course not! Why is online any different?

icelancer2• 7 years ago

You don't need to teach the kids this. They are already moving towards peer-to-peer, encrypted, and ephemeral forms of communication. They also lock their Instagrams, have secondary fake Instagrams (finstas), and obscure their identities.

All the EFF privacy advocates who desperately hope that people will listen to them miss the forest for the trees. The kids are smart. They're adapting. Just like we did.

tzs• 7 years ago

140 alerts in 8 months is about one alert every 1.7 days.

The Brazosport Independent School District has over 12k students and 800 teachers. I'd expect 12k students are Tweeting and Facebooking hundreds, if not thousands of times a day.

Furthermore, the social media monitoring, according to the article, includes adults from the surrounding community, not just people associated with the school. I can't find population stats for that, but the county that the district is in has a population over over 360k. Adults probably don't Tweet and Facebook as much as kids, but there are probably still hundreds a day from them.

It looks like only a tiny fraction of the posts generate an alert. The alerts come infrequently enough that those who receive them should easily have time to go look at them in context, which should let them quickly dismiss almost all false positives.

I've having trouble seeing what I should be upset about here.

Aeolun3• 7 years ago

The fact that it is happening at all?

It’s like as if there was a ghostly principal (actually more like an army of officials, according to the post) hovering above us as I was growing up.

rgrieselhuber7• 7 years ago

I always lose a few magical internet points when I say this, but, if possible, avoid public schools.

oyebenny• 7 years ago

And what have we learned about private institutions?

But that leaves us with homeschooling...

rgrieselhuber7• 7 years ago

Homeschooling has come a long way. It’s a sacrifice, for sure, but far easier now than it was even 20 years ago.

eximius• 7 years ago

I don't understand. Are we supposed to know that private schools are also bad?

Private schools are a form of socioeconomic class segregation and there are problems with them, but I would definitely believe that private schools are, by most metrics, better schools.

Mirioron• 7 years ago

I cannot believe that these people are so dense:

"Why would it have a chilling effect if the superintendent of the school might see something that slips through the system about someone went hunting?" he asked. "There's no threat."

How is the following not harm?

He pointed to a recent incident in which Social Sentinel flagged a college student who threatened on Twitter to shoot his professor for scheduling an early morning exam. (The student, who said he intended no harm, was arrested.)

dsfyu404ed4• 7 years ago

They're not dense. These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable. Their world view simply does not align with yours or mine. They simply do not consider the use these kind of systems to be fundamentally incompatible with free society the way you or I do.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC• 7 years ago

These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable.

Except they don't. The moment the totalitarian society started to demand conformance to something they don't like, you can be sure they would object.

rotrux2• 7 years ago

This thread is frustrating. First off, there's a typo in the quote. The word "who" is missing: "..someone who went hunting?"

Second off, even if the missing word was "we": "...someone we went hunting." The CEO of the company supplying the software has a direct incentive to see things from the other side. It's not denseness; it's business.

This is not a battle between totalitarians and freedom fighters, it's a battle between those who think security is more important within this context, and those who think privacy is more important within this context.

Gibbon14• 7 years ago

Your comment reminds me of a cautionary essay by a adolescent psychologist. Her warning was that psychologists are not a normative group because of the conformist selection process. Getting a PhD in psychology is an exercise in knuckling under. That is something that is pretty alien to a typical teenager.

As a result psychologists often see aberrant behavior in adolescents that is actually gob smack normal and ultimately harmless.

pjc50• 7 years ago

Consequence of widespread gun availability: all petty threats have to be taken seriously. In a world where every few months someone does turn up and murder several people at school, which is then all over the national news, it's hard to see how it can be otherwise.

devoply• 7 years ago

Schools in certain parts of the US, usually with more unruly students from lower income backgrounds, are pretty much set up like prisons. You can't leave the premises as the exits are heavily guarded, there are cops present, there are various sorts of checkpoints where things are searched. Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious. It's a bit of a mess.

noonespecial• 7 years ago

Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious.

Just getting them warmed up for the parole process later on.

cryoshon• 7 years ago

if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent.

imagine how many times you made a snide remark about a teacher or a principal to your peers in confidence. now, the target of your jeer will know that you're talking shit -- and, much like if they were to overhear trash talk about them in the hallways, they won't tolerate it. and so a bunch of harmless children will be caught in the surveillance net, and punished for normal behavior.

even worse, down the line you can be certain that state actors will gain access to the data sets produced by surveillance. then, in these kids' dossiers, they'll be marked as having anti-authoritarian tendencies as a result of their childhood discussions which were snooped on. throw in a social credit system, and someone may have a childhood remark following them for life.

iamnothere4• 7 years ago

if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent.

This may sound hyperbolic to some people (my schools were fine), but it is very true that school administration has a tendency to attract petty authoritarians. Who is easier to rule with an iron fist than powerless children?

I sometimes see things like the laptop spying scandal [0] and realize that I was very lucky to avoid these sorts of people as a kid.

[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-s...

Analemma_• 7 years ago

This is nasty, but the unpleasant truth is that these schools are just rationally responding to public pressure and doing CYA. Every time there's a school shooter, the first thing the parents and media do is dig through his angry Facebook posts and go, "Look at all these red flags! Why wasn't anything done?". Well, now the schools are doing something. It's not the right thing to do, and it's not going to fix anything, but getting angry at the schools isn't going to cause them to change course: they're responding to public demand. You need to start talking to parents and educating them.

yepguy2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't increased monitoring also increase their liability when something does go terribly wrong?

elliekelly3• 7 years ago

My first thought exactly. If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive I would have to imagine that opens them up to far greater liability than simply not knowing about the behavior in the first place.

arikr• 7 years ago

Dang could we possibly get a new title on this? The default one is a bit clickbaity.

srs_sput• 7 years ago

Also a link to the non mobile site please

apearson2• 7 years ago

Non-Mobile Link: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-de...

e12e• 7 years ago

"the secret [to creating fiction about technology that stays relevant] is basically to assume that people will be really stupid about technology for the foreseeable future."

Cory Doctorow on the anniversary of "Little Brother" https://craphound.com/littlebrother/

yepguy2• 7 years ago

To fight this, I don't think we should be talking about privacy or rights. That's all very important, but society is already fairly desensitized to that language, and the pro-surveillance side can literally point to the dead bodies of real children.

Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children. Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.

bilbo0s6• 7 years ago

That won't work either though.

I can hear it now:

<sarcasm> "Well, if by 'increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior' you mean 'not molesting the girls and refraining from committing school shootings' then maybe they should have systems like this!" </sarcasm>

You need to have some arguments not centered around the idea of behavior. Because that idea will be thrown back at you almost immediately. Behavior is exactly what these people will say they are trying to change.

Aeolun3• 7 years ago

It’s so crazy considering the kids are exhibiting the exact same behavior as their parents 20-30 years ago. Puberty isn’t new...

shrimp_emoji• 7 years ago

they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.

Wait, I thought that was school in a nutshell already. :D That's certainly all it did for me until I hit college.

imgabe• 7 years ago

The issue is that this indoctrinates children into living in a totalitarian state. If you never have any freedom as a child, how will you know it's missing as an adult?

LanceH• 7 years ago

My solution is generally to apply the same rules to the people enforcing the rules. Drug test students? Drug test the administration, superintendents, board of education, etc...

icelancer2• 7 years ago

> Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior...

Most parents want this.

flukus• 7 years ago

Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children.

I think we should skip logic and go for the emotional "what happens when a pedophile get's this information" argument. There's certainly enough truth to it, a pedophile having that sort of surveillance data could do all sorts of psychological manipulation, even getting access to the schools database would do it.

esaym11• 7 years ago

Ah Clute, Texas. Howdy from Brazosport class of 2002! This is the second article mentioning this area on HN I've seen in the last 3 years or so. The first one mentioned Brazosport as the dropout capital of the entire USA. So I doubt anyone within a 100 mile radius of there has ever heard of HN (but waiting to be proven wrong).

Edit:

I guess to add more context. This is probably an example of a small, underfunded, school district being coaxed into purchasing something it doesn't even need, or the administration doesn't even understand.

danmg3• 7 years ago

The school district I graduated from, around the same time, hired some consultant who used Brazosport, TX as the role model on how to improve their NCLB related standardized test scores. It did not turn out well.

esaym11• 7 years ago

Brazosport (in the mid 1990's) had very good scores on the standardized tests. But that was literally all they taught. And this was the TAAS test which had very little content in it.

mixmastamyk2• 7 years ago

It's not clear from the article how the system monitors encrypted social media traffic. Perhaps Twitter as it is public afterward, right? Or does it look for public posts to local groups in Facebook? Or everyone has location tagging on posts on other sites?

How are these companies getting their information to analyze?

mirimir• 7 years ago

They just look at public posts, I guess.

What puzzles me is this:

Social media monitoring companies track the posts of everyone in the areas surrounding schools, including adults.

Do Facebook, Twitter, etc expose geotags in posts?

esaym11• 7 years ago

I'm wondering the same. There's another company that does the same[0] and probably several more. I know I've read reports of police departments getting more lucrative access into private facebook posts. Perhaps it is the same for a company trying to "help" a school district as well.

0:https://geolistening.com/

handzbagz1• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if this is what you mean but most of these systems install a HTTPS certificate on the device so they can analyse the data and re-encrypt it.

mixmastamyk2• 7 years ago

And how to do that on random mobile devices in the area?

apearson2• 7 years ago

Non-Mobile Link: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-de...

dqpb• 7 years ago

This should be fairly easy to DOS

bilbo0s6• 7 years ago

Not quite as easy as your Jedi Hand Wave-y assertion makes it out to be. Letting the Authorities acclimate children to this sort of environment is dangerous for society.

Avamander4• 7 years ago

Only if you aren't afraid of the ridiculous consequences.

aitchnyu• 7 years ago

They could adopt a vocabulary equivalent to Ad Nauseum: "Oh shoot", "this song is my cocaine", "I'm gunning for you".

elliekelly3• 7 years ago

Evergreen Public Schools in Washington state, for example, started using the company's service this school year. Between September and mid-March, the system flagged more than 9,000 incidents in the 26,000-student district. The overwhelming majority-84 percent-were for minor violations, such as profanity.

The fact that the system even monitors for profanity at all tells me its purpose has a lot more to do with student surveillance than it does with student safety.

notathingreally2• 7 years ago

That was exactly my thought. How does finding an assignment with the word "pussy" in it help anyone? (Plus if it's an assignment, wouldn't the teacher eventually see it? WTF?) I just don't get what parents and school administrators think they're achieving with this given the potential harm that can come from it. Were I a parent, I certainly wouldn't want some random person at the school to have access to everything my kid does online. Especially knowing how creepy some of the school administrators I dealt with growing up were!

mieseratte• 7 years ago

Having had my 1A rights flagrantly violated by a petty administrator, I wholeheartedly agree. We need to worry about surveilling dysfunctional bureaucrats and their behavior, not students.

TheOperator3• 7 years ago

I don't nessecarily have an issue with surveillance systems as they act as force multipliers for all sorts of noble causes.

Surveillance systems should strictly be used for physical safety, anti-vandalism, and loss prevention purposes. You're not preparing kids to succeed by micromanaging them from behind a series of monitors. At all. People who intend to use the system to punish the kids for swearing by no means should be allowed access. The teachers and even the principal really shouldn't even have access to reduce the temptation to abuse the surveillance system. If they keep getting access the surveillance system should be thrown in the trash.

Bosses who use similar systems to keep their employees working can also expect nothing better than mediocrity and a widespread CYA mentality.

zepto• 7 years ago

What noble causes do they currently act as force multipliers for?

astazangasta• 7 years ago

Every surveillance system will be used to persecute innocent people who the surveillers do not like. Moreover, it has long been argued that surveillance itself is a form of persecution. See Bentham, Foucault etc.

closetohome2• 7 years ago

As a Washingtonian I'd like to defensively point out that Evergreen School District is in the part of the state with all the idiots and measles.

dang• 7 years ago

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

throwaway66666• 7 years ago

You think these schools and teachers want to educate kids? These people want to just get their salary at the end of the month and eliminate all potential liabilities that could get them in trouble.

They would ban eye contact and speaking to each other, if it would bring them more peace of mind and job security. Kinda like dictators do...

LordDragonfang2• 7 years ago

There are lots and lots of good teachers that do want to educate kids. You don't go into teaching high school for the money.

The further you go up the administrative chain, the less true that statement becomes, however.

panzagl8• 7 years ago

Do any of the naysayers here work in a public capacity- teacher, law enforcement, military/intelligence, etc? Have you ever been solely responsible for the security and well-being of more than, say a half-dozen total strangers? It's a hard problem, a continual tweaking of what we would see as engineering trade-offs, usually performed by people with minimal training, support, or reward who are stuck with the responsibility by default.

Supposedly we're here because we want to apply technology to hard problems- well, here's one of the hardest, and here's how it's been applied so far. Let's have a more reasonable discussion than a bunch of thin-veiled whining about how it will affect our torrents.

ameister143• 7 years ago

I have, yes. However, I don't believe it's always necessary to have experience doing something in order to understand how it works - humans developed pretty well in ways to enable us to share experience with one another.

Anyway, as I see it first we should agree on what exactly the problem is; in this case, it appears this was created to solve the problem of mass shootings in schools.

If that is the problem, this solution goes well beyond what is necessary to solve it. Further, it remains to be seen whether this solution actually works to solve the problem at all.

So you have something that might work but definitely does a bunch of unnecessary things. At best, you have an incredibly inefficient solution and at worst something that actively harms people.

panzagl8• 7 years ago

How does it go beyond? The systems discussed either grab public social media, or monitor information created on the schools' machines. I don't know that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy on either.

faissaloo• 7 years ago

I was (and still am) against the monitoring, restriction and limiting of student devices at school. I find it deeply disturbing that children are going to be monitored when they aren't even on school grounds, it's nightmarish. Every day homeschooling my future children looks exponentially better.

vangelis• 7 years ago

I figure the psychological damage will create even more school shooters. shrug

manfredo2• 7 years ago

I was the type of high school student that would deliberately spam profanity and other things that would trigger this system just to spite the administrators. Privacy through obfuscation: when alarm bell rings all the time then the alarm bell becomes meaningless.

atoav• 7 years ago

Teach them early that we don’t live in free societies any more. How else would you go about building tomorrow’s distopia?

We actually need the opposite: we need schools that create educated, crtically thinking individuals that don’t hessitate to work together for thw future.

Avamander4• 7 years ago

I think this is just a strategy for moving the Overton window.

"Look what we can do! Instead we opted in for this [vendor] MITM proxy and cameras in each classroom that snoop on your kids' activities! Much less invasive ;)"

shapiro1• 7 years ago

I bullied a kid in middle school to the point where he switched classes. Teachers didn’t panick and kick me out, rather they listened to both sides and let us figure it out. We talked and became really good friends, even to this day!

Humans aren’t perfect. I’m not saying bullying is good, but the best solution is not to punishment. I’d certainly spiral out of control and become a monster had I been kicked out.

Scandinavian pedagogy is great!

Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

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