Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/21/calls-to-shut-down-bristol-schools-use-of-think-family-education-app-pupils-and-families

by pera • 3 years ago

174 162 3 years ago

theguardian.com

throwaway712712• 3 years ago

Bristol city council and Avon and Somerset police, who worked together on the system, insist it is in place to protect children, not criminalise them

Of course! When has surveillance been used for anything, but protection?

robertlagrant7• 3 years ago

This is a category error. The worst uses of surveillance in general do not apply to this case, unless someone tells us how it does.

donatj• 3 years ago

When you give someone a power, always consider that it will basically always be used in the worst imaginable way. Regardless of any and all lip service to the contrary.

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

Predatory teachers may use this to get some background details on their targets or to identify potential targets for grooming. Luckily those kinds of teachers are rare, but not unknown.

Also, some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into the database and this could then affect the families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been prejudiced by the data.

ballenf2• 3 years ago

worst uses of surveillance in general do not apply to this case

So only the "pretty bad" uses of surveillance apply and that's ok? Not sure I understand your point.

Ylpertnodi• 3 years ago

"The force said “robust privacy and sharing agreements” had been approved by the Information Commissioner’s Office and development of the system done in collaboration with the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation."

...but not the parents.

ncr1002• 3 years ago

Are these government institutions in Bristol? If so do they have public blogs or other citizen friendly mechanics for sharing important decisions?

tempaway226418• 3 years ago

Yep here's a UK gov report about the data sharing that makes the app possible

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

RHSeeger2• 3 years ago

There is plenty of information about a child that, if made known to the parents, would wreak havoc on the child's life. For example, through metadata alone, it could be possible to identify that a child has LGBTQA interests/associations/etc. There are plenty of children where the parents knowing this could lead to them being punished harshly, or even on the streets. I don't think automatically sharing everything with parents is the expectation/panacea you seem to imply it would be.

Admittedly, I don't think the schools should have this information either.

merpnderp2• 3 years ago

The title made it sound like the schools were installing malware on students' devices, but as far as I can tell this is just a central database bringing together data from different government agencies.

I'm not sure I see the problem with schools getting an update that a kid was arrested by police or that their family is on food aid or something. Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over the summer.

hef198982• 3 years ago

I am not sure any of that is any of a schools business. Not even sure something like that would be legal over here.

Doctor_Fegg3• 3 years ago

In the UK it's absolutely common for schools to be involved in family welfare simply because the other arms of the state have withered away to uselessness. In theory there's a concept of "Team Around The Child" where the various agencies - school, social services, social housing, sometimes even police - can come together to help the child through the rough circumstances they're in. In practice, the only one of those that isn't entirely dysfunctional is the school, and so you'll often find school headteachers or SENCOs basically acting as the sole champion of a kid from a troubled family.

ballenf2• 3 years ago

Maybe the real problem is that there exists a system design to allow querying a person's family connections to police interactions. This isn't even just convictions, but basically any accusations or investigations. The wording is kind of vague, but I think this framing is supported by the article.

The existence of such a system just seems dystopian.

Seems entirely reasonable that issues of domestic violence should be known to schools, but this goes way beyond that.

It's only a matter of time before more public institutions manufacture reasons to use the same system. Surely the NIH should know about your police interactions before treating you.

pera• 3 years ago

The council provides a data flow diagram showing the source of the data:

https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/5972-insight-bris...

didntcheck8• 3 years ago

Yep. The fact that you can effectively be smeared by a state-managed record with often no right of appeal is disturbing. And this isn't the only scenario. Look up "non-crime hate incidents", which depend largely on a victim's claim that the event took place and that they believe it was "hateful", and I believe can show up on some DBS background checks. Why are the police disclosing these events that are by definition non-crimes?

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone [1]

David Cameron was rightly criticized for those comments in 2015. Unfortunately there's been a bit of a culture shift since then, and it's now often those same critics supporting similar measures and implying that you must have something to hide if you fear them

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/13/counter-terr...

fullspectrumdev• 3 years ago

Nah the spyware is sold by a different company - for example, Impero.

vharuck• 3 years ago

Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over the summer.

What's wrong with just asking the parents?

IggleSniggle• 3 years ago

Not all parents will respond, and of those that do, not all parents respond honestly. But the child still needs to be fed, whether the parent thinks they need to be fed or not.

lolinder• 3 years ago

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.

candiodari• 3 years ago

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".

pydry• 3 years ago

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.

oconnor663• 3 years ago

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.

fatnoah• 3 years ago

Speaking of red flags:

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.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over the summer.

This is the sort of thing that sounds good at first but ends up with these big brother databases.

Really, why is it the responsibility of the school to send home food with a child? Schools should teach. That's it. If there is a need to send food to some family, there are agencies and charities that are specifically created and empowered to do that job.

Using schools as conduits for all sorts of unrelated social services is why our schools are so fucked up. Instead of just being focused on teaching, they are now responsible for psychological services, food distribution to the needy, substance abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse intervention, mandatory reporting of any number of other concerns, all of which contributes to the need to monitor everything and centrally catalog and track as much information as you can about kids and their families.

It was one thing when this kind of stuff might be a note in a file folder, but now it's online, probably poorly secured, and will never be deleted.

merpnderp2• 3 years ago

Man I totally agree with you, but you have to understand how bad meth has made things. The schools used to send home coats and clothing too, but the parents would sell them. In a just world the state would throw those piece of shit parents in rehab and have a wonderful place for the kids to stay until their parents either straightened up or lost custody. But it is what it is and we do what we can.

didntcheck8• 3 years ago

I wish people would stop calling any website/networked service an "app". That's just the interface

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

Why would they keep it secret from the families and children unless it's doing something nefarious?

jjgreen2• 3 years ago

Quite, if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to hide ...

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

If we've done nothing wrong, then why are they looking...

By the way, can you send me your bank and credit card details so that I can just verify that you've done nothing wrong?

ben_w3• 3 years ago

https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...

They're not keeping it secret. It's the same sort of thing as all the EULAs/T&Cs we have to click agree to: much too boring to pay attention to, unless it's a headline.

That said:

How long we will keep your personal information?
We will hold this information for as long as it is needed, or if we are required to do so by law. In practice this means that your personal information may be retained for the relevant period listed below:
• Integrated family Support (1772), 75 years

- https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/5977-insight-bris...

How on Earth is 75 years a legitimate duration for any of this information?

badcppdev3• 3 years ago

You need to read up on your torts. Injury or harm done to a young person can result in a claim for compensation later in life. That's why paediatric insurance is so complicated.

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

Just putting an information page up on the council's website isn't very useful unless the children and families know about the system and know to go looking for it. "The plans were on display..." etc.

From TFA:

School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: “They [parents and carers] wouldn’t know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don’t know of its existence.”

samwillis• 3 years ago

I have a friend who has been the safeguarding lead in a school, it's a tough and emotional job with enormous responsibility. He's found it incredibly fulfilling, but I can only imagine what he has had to deal with based on the few hits we have heard.

My understanding is that the teachers that take on these roles are incredibly well trained, understand the responsibility, and know how to be both discreet and keep things privet. I believe a lot of the information available through this app was already being made available to the safeguarding leads in schools.

Challenging the use of this app is good, that's the role of these origination, checks and balances and all that. We need to be sure it is a net benefit for all involved. There is no denying though that if it helps teachers in safeguarding children that is a good thing.

swagempire2• 3 years ago

What is a "safegaurding lead"? It sounds kind of creepy from your description.

badcppdev3• 3 years ago

It's the UK term for the person in any organisation that deals with vulnerable people (children, patients, disabled people, old people) that has the responsibility of taking any allegations, concerns, accusations and making sure they are dealt with properly. That means documenting, investigating, and escalating to the authorities.

bmsleight_2• 3 years ago

There is no denying though that if it helps teachers in safeguarding children that is a good thing.

The problem is the variability of quality of teachers. I seen and been involved, both as a parent and governor with Safeguarding leads. There has been wonderful, caring and talented teachers. I am not convinced the excellent teachers need more data - they know the kids and the families very well and can draw on years of experience and support.

There has been also teachers, which have out-dated views and prejudices. This tool in the wrong hand makes matters far worse. This feels like a tool put together with people with outdated views. Like teenage parents are an indicator of a need for safe-guarding or being out of work is a correlation for safe-guiding. This clear prejudices being born-out.

ben_w3• 3 years ago

Schools using the TFE app receive alerts about children’s and family members’ contact with police, antisocial behaviour and domestic violence incidents. The system also gives schools access to sensitive personal details about families’ financial situations.

Financial situations? That sounds like they're monitoring what's easy to monitor, even if defending against domestic violence was the original intention.

That said, "we joined up thinking" is definitely a valid argument for much of what the UK is doing right now.

For those not following UK news: a large number of schools had to be closed this month due to people finally started paying attention to the fact that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete lasted 30 years but had been installed 50 years ago.

Monitoring that would have been sensible… but they'd have needed joined-up thinking to have noticed the problem had started happening in the 90s. (Thus making it one of the few cases where one can legitimately also spread blame to the previous Labour government even though the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years).

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

the article constantly mentions racism and i don't understand how racism fits into this picture

i think when they write things like that it means "we don't mean to expose the racist behavior of certain black students when we spy on them through apps we force them to install", which is pretty crooked all around

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

the article constantly mentions racism and i don't understand how racism fits into this picture

Some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into the database and this could then affect the families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been prejudiced by the data.

onetimeusename• 3 years ago

I noticed that too and was wondering about it, then I saw this quote:

Critics say the reality is that this risks children from minority ethnic or poorer backgrounds being profiled as being involved in gangs or county lines operations.

So the fear seems to stem from this.

didntcheck8• 3 years ago

It's a Guardian article. You get used to it...

swayvil• 3 years ago

We call it "right to privacy". But what if we call it "right to hide" or "right to lie" or "right to censor"? That certainly puts a different light on it.

Universal 24-7 communication about absolutely everything would be a very very good thing. Take our whole society up a level.

Except that we have these big predators lurking about.

So the problem isn't the privacy, it's the predators. Right?

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

I think you've got it back-to-front.

Personal identifying information does not belong to any company that gathers or purchases it unless they have specific permission (i.e. not some dark pattern "click here to disable the non-collection of your data") from the person and it is reasonable for them to have that data for their stated purpose. (Somewhat paraphrased from GDPR). The company and or government department need to have a strong reason to be manipulating the family's data and the family should have the right to see the data that is being held on them and also correct or delete it if it is incorrect.

whelp_24• 3 years ago

Is this parody? Is the right to lie really all that scary? Do you want to live in a world where you can hide nothing?

hollowdene• 3 years ago

I feel like the correct answer is proper oversight of how the system is used, not a blanket shutdown in case it's misused. Perhaps these charities who complaining should be involved in that?

The goal of the service seems sensible, especially when you consider how often public services have made serious mistakes due to "information silos".

morkalork• 3 years ago

Not just the UK does this, in Canada there is something similar: https://www.vice.com/en/article/kzdp5v/police-in-canada-are-...

And it's not just police sharing data with schools, but also in the other direction where schools share data like unauthorized absences.

tempaway226418• 3 years ago

Lots of people here not really understanding how this works in the UK.

A few times there's been a big media stories in the UK about a child who got badly abused or killed in domestic situations and then afterwards it turns out that various people (social services, teachers, charities etc) had concerns about the child's safety but concerns weren't written down or joined together and so the child could have been saved/rescued but wasn't.

So now in the UK we have a system of 'safeguarding referrals' where if someone has concerns they must make a safeguarding referral to social services but social services are terribly underfunded so the safeguarding referrals tend to pile up or just get filed unless they are really urgent. So now we have the problem of someone somewhere being responsible for wading through all the information and then identifying when the various reports from various places add up to a serious situation.

Hence you get an app like this where info from various agencies can be gathered in one place. https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...

If you're going to hold government services such as social services or teachers responsible for childrens safety then this sort of thing is needed. And if you think thats not the job of the state then fair enough thats your opinion but in the UK the status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after vulnerable children/people.

tempaway226418• 3 years ago

Here's the description of the system from https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...

Think Family Database (TFD)

---------------------------

The Think Family Database (TFD) supports and connects safeguarding professionals from Bristol City Council and other public sector organisations.

The data collected by Insight Bristol is securely held in the TFD, and includes information from approximately 50,000 families across Bristol.

The TFD pulls together data from several public sector sources including:

-Bristol City Council (Children Social care, Early Help, Education)

-Avon and Somerset Police

-Department for Education

-Department for Work and Pensions

-South West Commissioning Support Unit (SWCSU)

The data from these organisations displays vulnerabilities or needs. It gives practitioners working with families an understanding of:

-the family's immediate need

-which services the need comes from

The practitioner can contact the relevant service. This helps the practitioner better support the family because:

-the practitioner can discuss the family's immediate issues with the agencies involved

-the family does not have to repeat the same story

This embedded approach helps practitioners coordinate support for families who are most in need. Sometimes those families are obvious but often they are hidden. The TFD highlights the hidden issues.

Using targeted analytics, the system also helps identify children at risk of:

-sexual exploitation

-criminal exploitation

-not being in education, employment, or training

This information supplements the wider council Think Family approach.

These models do not replace professional judgement or decision-making. They guide and supplement the work of professionals and provide information about children at risk that professionals may not easily see. This early identification means that support and interventions can be put in place to stop problems turning into crises.

tempaway226418• 3 years ago

And here's a uk government report about the data sharing mechanisms for the app https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

rob1373• 3 years ago

I'll just throw in that I volunteer for an organisation that often deals with children, and in many ways safeguarding has been a disaster. I can totally see how good intentions following the 'Baby P'* case led to laws like this. But the reaction from many organisations has been to completely reorient themselves, and at all costs.

This is quite natural given that ultimately the law poses the greatest threat to the leaders of charities, schools etc. You really don't want a high profile failure on your watch.

When I was trained to lead shifts of volunteers, it stood out to me that the only instruction I received was in safeguarding...

My first thought was that something simply isn't quite right, since safeguarding is far newer than the organisation itself.

But actually I think this is just the way of things. If you have enormous punishments, then you will have commensurate reactions from management.

We've lost a large number of volunteers because we can no longer guarantee anonymity to young people. Initially we were reassured that we would only be expected to report things when identifying information was willingly given to us. This has since been revised to instructions that we are to actively seek such information.

The law itself was brought in following high profile instances of horrific abuse that went overlooked by social services. However, the scope of the law is surprisingly wide.

For instance, this would all apply to a 17-year-old who mentions that they were being bullied by peers.

I myself do feel conflicted - abuse is terrible, and it's worth tolerating other kinds of indirect harm to prevent. But it's still shocking to me that the second order consequences don't appear to get discussed at all in the public sphere. I do worry that this has been snuck in as a "Save The Puppies Act" without proper deliberation.

I'm unsure if there are other countries who have pretty much identical laws, or if it is just the UK?

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Connelly

tempaway226418• 3 years ago

Yes I've seen the same thing. As you say, lots of orgs have had to reorient themselves around the safeguarding process

joncrocks• 3 years ago

I don't think it's just the UK.

I think the issue is that it's very hard to have open discussions about accepting that certain events are unavoidable and preferable to the second order impacts of trying to 'solve the problem'.

It's hard to talk about at least in part that 'the problem' in these situations tends to be a terrible event that can be avoided, but only avoided by doing lots of lots of 'ever so slightly terrible' things. And so it takes a toll on the soul to look at the balance and say that we should live with 'the problem'.

matheusmoreira3• 3 years ago

So many tragedies happen daily because of human imperfections and limitations. If we develop and put a monitoring collar on the neck of every human being from the day they wre born, we could save so many of them.

How far are you willing to go?

tempaway226418• 3 years ago

I dont think anyones advocating going that far

edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between the two ludicrous extremes of 'everyone just look out for themselves' and 'collars that monitor every moment of their lives' based on general consensus arrived at via public discussion and democracy.

Silhouette5• 3 years ago

This is the heart of the problem. When you start trying to turn people like teachers and doctors into something other than teachers and doctors you risk breaking the essential trust between parents and the professionals who have a role in their children's lives. That is a dangerous path to follow. Obviously no-one wants to see any child suffering abuse or neglect and obviously as a last resort the authorities might have to intervene to protect a vulnerable child from harm. But there are other dangers with measures like this that are easily overlooked in our culture today and I'm not sure that's healthy.

Doctor_Fegg3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately 13 years of Conservative Party government means that there's no-one left, apart from the teachers, to do the "something other". Phone up your local UK health trust and ask what the waiting time is for a CAMHS referral (Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service). Here's the first one I googled: 30 months. https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/camhs/oxon/ndc/assessment/

imnotlost• 3 years ago

The Brits have gone all in on the surveillance society with their CCTV cameras all over the place and now the Online Safety Bill. Still early days, I'm sure it'll be expanded at every opportunity. Maybe 1984 is the blueprint.

In the US the fundamental Christians are grabbing power and they're taking flamethrowers to books and talking about tracking women who may go across state-lines to get an abortion. Self-censorship for fear of being 'canceled' is putting a damper on the spirit of freedom. It's perhaps more along the lines of Fahrenheit 451.

May you live in interesting times.

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

Well, as a Brit, I agree with the surveillance society bit although the police don't even have time to go after the crims, so I suspect that most surveillance footage is ignored unless you're a political figure.

As a devout atheist, I have a particular view of Christians and from what I can gather, the Christo-fascists in the U.S. trying to grab power are Christian in name only and represent almost the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus. I think it's more of a fascist movement that picks on the most gullible and easily led of groups for their support base.

giantg23• 3 years ago

"although the police don't even have time to go after the crims,"

That's how it always works, even in the US. Selective enforcement of the laws against some group (or to favor some group).

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

It's not just the British.

For decades in the US, school administrators have been obsessed with monitoring student's online activity and email. There is a lucrative industry providing what amounts to glue and regexs for detecting and reporting suicidal language, threats of violence, and so on (you can be sure there's detection of LGBTQ language for all the various religious schools.)

There is a subreddit for K-12 IT administrators and the stuff people would post there about monitoring students was pretty shocking (also, the levels of incompetence are also pretty shocking. Most of the crowd are barely competent at IT basics. People who are in charge of IT at multiple campuses.)

Tell your kids that any email account associated with the school, and anything they even type into a school device (phone, tablet, laptop, computer) is monitored, and even the most innocent keyword could flag their email and put it front of admins. If they want to talk to a trusted friend about anything regarding the administrator or teachers, or something regarding mental health, sexuality, bullying, violence, etc - they need to do it on devices not associated with the school, with no school management software installed, on non-school accounts.

In fact, they should probably never use their school accounts or devices for anything except strictly school related communication and work.

It's amazing how completely ignorant these admins are that, say, hauling a suicidal student into a meeting with administrators is just about the last fucking thing that kid needs, and yet that's exactly what was described in some posts and discussions. The only thing they care about is snooping in student's activity and covering the school's ass.

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

Sadly a lot of kids only have one portal to the internet and that’s through a school device.

Otherwise the advice should be, as you said, to never use a school device for anything not explicitly required by the school. But when there’s no other route, surveilled access is better than none, I guess?

It’s a tough quandary though - schools can be held liable, at least socially so if not legally, if kids use school provided devices for all the things kids use devices for that they shouldn’t. Meeting sexual predators, bullying, etc. Many parents are technically incapable of monitoring their online activity, others too busy. Schools are being put in a weird spot of being access providers to an adult world online, not just educators.

I’ll wager a lot of school surveillance started with parents demanding it.

It’s a tough subject, I don’t have the answer. My intuition tells me schools shouldn’t be involved in access OR monitoring, but I also understand the “digital divide” isn’t just a media term. A lot of pretty smart kids live in a pretty neglected context, and without access to sources of fact like Wikipedia or sources of dubious plagiarism like ChatGPT (tongue in cheek), they’re at a structural disadvantage that can’t be overcome through hard work alone.

MSFT_Edging• 3 years ago

Self-censorship for fear of being 'canceled' is putting a damper on the spirit of freedom.

I'm always curious about what people mean by this, because usually its people upset they can't say the N-word or upset they're getting cancelled over being sex pests.

dgroshev2• 3 years ago

The CCTV meme is completely disconnected from reality. There are plenty of CCTV cameras around, but they aren't connected in any way, most of them are private, and in reality the police mostly can't be bothered to try and access the recordings. American obsession with Ring-like cloud connected cameras and their dealings with police forces are way more dystopian than the reality of CCTV as practiced in Britain.

A good example is my partner getting pickpocketed on an empty tube train, which surely should make finding the person easy, right? Nope, the Met told me they'd need to go and pay the train maintenance company to retrieve the recordings from each carriage on the train, and they're not going to do that over a wallet.

In practice it works pretty well, because it implicitly sets a very high bar on the severity of the crime that would warrant retrieving dozens of recordings and tracing people through them. Skripal poisoning or murders get that treatment and are solved pretty quickly. Small scale crime (or whatever dystopian thought crime scenarios people imagine) doesn't.

guitarbill• 3 years ago

and in reality the police mostly can't be bothered to try and access the recordings

obviously this is the case if you are a normal citizen. imagine how fast they'd access the recordings if a police officer was hurt, or to identify protesters, etc

didntcheck8• 3 years ago

While I agree that our politicians are obsessed with sticking their nose in people's private business (and the shadow cabinet often merely object that the proposals don't go far enough!), but I would say this is mostly down to a different issue - an overzealous obsession with "safeguarding" and the belief that it must be possible to preemptively block all societal harms, and that those objecting to the cost of the attempts must just be running apologetics.

I have friends and family who work in education and other social care roles, so hear about the various training and policy they're given, and it almost feels like the public sector is putting parents on perpetual trial. And there's the underlying assumption of "if in doubt, raise it", with the false belief that a false report is harmless and will surely come out in the wash with no harm from the process.

Though it's important to remember this isn't down to the staff all being little Umbridges wanting to cause stress; as usual it's down to incentives. They are explicitly told they could be at fault for failing to report a Potential Safeguarding Issue, so it's the safer option in doubt. And at an organisational level, any instance where a child does come to harm leads to potentially nationwide accusations of negligence (sometimes fair) and demands to Do Something, no matter what that something is, what its collateral costs are, and if it even works in the first place.

And of course it would be unfair not to mention that the teachers themselves are often very much victims of similar overscrutiny, and are quite used to self-policing their behavior, with fear of both policy violations and parents' ire. Again, I'm largely criticizing the policy not the people. The common sense and discretion of workers on the ground is often a good defense against stupid policy, but not when there's a credible fear of being disciplined for that

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

I guess main the problem is the secrecy. Even the article is unable to say exactly what information the app has, and who has access to it—they mention safeguarding leads being the users, but then talk about how "schools" get notified when a student has an encounter with the police. Does this information get sent only to qualified professionals with clear accountability, or does it get sent to a shared email address that the administrators' receptionist reads?

The secretive approach to this is unsettling, because it implies they know they're doing something they'd get in trouble for. It sounds like the administration's response was "well, this app was public, parents could have read up on it if they wanted", which resembles the old better to ask forgiveness than permission tactic. Clearly, every part of this plan should have been proactively explained to parents beforehand.

voakbasda• 3 years ago

Secrecy is an integral part of the effectiveness of the system. If you know how the algorithm works, you can find ways to game it. That doesn't make the practice acceptable, but I think it explains the approach.

FWIW, the same secretive approach prevents anyone from knowing why their social media accounts were banned, or how changes to a website will affect their ranking in the search engines. Exposing the underlying algorithms creates an arms race that will lead to even bigger problems.

doctorpangloss• 3 years ago

Hmm, but you can deploy essentially infinite resources for free in arbitrage to exploiting an algorithmic quirk in social media distribution, search engine rankings, etc.

What exactly is the comparable threat model here? It's ridiculous. What are they exploiting, trace amounts of government resources? For one family?

tempaway226418• 3 years ago

There's no secrecy about it, the app, who has access to it and why is explained here:

https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/social-care-and-health/...

ndsipa_pomu21• 3 years ago

...with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

As I said in the comment you replied to, it should have been proactive. What I see here is that there exists a single page of text somewhere on a government website, waiting for parents to find it if they search around. I didn't see anything in that article about parents being informed the school was even using the app, let alone given a chance to ask questions or, you know, consent.

roody15• 3 years ago

We use a product called Linewize in my district for around 2500 students. To be honest its reporting is creepy to the degree it analyzes and tries to assign labels to student activity. Hate Speech, aggression, depression, suicide, criminality, gangs, sexual conduct, etc.

I think we as a society need to decide are we just biological automatons that can be controlled via inputs and outputs? Or do we believe in some form of free will and with that some personal privacy.

limbicsystem• 3 years ago

Can we also have a discussion about the 'normal' behaviour monitoring tools like Classcharts that are used by pretty much every school in the UK? These collect fine-grained data about behaviour throughout the day and link it both to the child but also the people that are near that child. It operates all across the child's school career. I've tried to opt my kids out of this but it's really hard. At best I think they have stopped logging their behaviour but they are still in the data as a 'network' influence. Classcharts used to boast about how their AI could do behavioural profiling but that looked too creepy so now they just talk about how teachers can use the data for seating planning. I'm pretty sure that I could use the data to profile a child pretty effectively even after they have left school. God only knows what happens to the data or how it is secured - the school literally don't care and think I'm crazy for even asking.

kwhitefoot2• 3 years ago

I'm so glad I don't have children in school in the UK. There seems to be so much going on that has nothing to do with education. I'm glad that when I was at school in the sixties and seventies in the UK none of that existed and teachers pretty much just taught.

How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?

Silhouette5• 3 years ago

How did it creep in without protest?

"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."

I worry that our school system is now made up of teachers and support staff who are still absurdly undervalued and trying really hard to give our kids a good education but then a whole layer of management above them who have lost the plot.

bowsamic• 3 years ago

How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?

See the discussion in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37594179

lawlessone• 3 years ago

How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?

Apathy as others have mentioned. Apathy because people are tired. And maybe apathy because it's clearly being aimed at people for class and/or ethnicity. People tolerate a lot of bad if doesn't affect them in particular.

circuit10• 3 years ago

I guess whether it’s fine grained throughout the day depends on the school, in my school they would only really give positive/negative points maybe once a week or less (if that’s what you’re talking about)

didntcheck8• 3 years ago

Yeah, the one good thought I did have when learning about this tool was "most teachers are not going to have the time to fiddle with this during teaching". But I'm sure there are several companies currently working on a way to do this scoring automatically via commodity webcams facing the class

didntcheck8• 3 years ago

Just had a watch of their demo video. One of the seating plan sliders allows you to cluster pupils by free school meals (i.e. socioeconomic class) or EAL status. Such wonderful technology!

TheHappyOddish2• 3 years ago

This is unfair for me to ask, but what are you doing about it? This impacts you, your children and your peers. Identifying and protecting your own is great, but what are you doing to ensure those not as tech savvy and critically minded are ensnared in this?

People need to push back on this sort of thing - if they don't, it just steamrolls forward.

jsndidneske• 3 years ago

That is no way to raise your child.

giantg23• 3 years ago

Sounds a lot like the systems some police departments are using to profile people who might commit crimes before they actually happen. Voyager, or something like that?

surfingdino• 3 years ago

Are they using similar software at Eton?

Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

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