The Surveilled Student (2021)
chronicle.comAlso see the installation of "HALO" type detectors in schools.
They use zero-party audio recording to detect 'gunshots' (why the fuck does a school need this to detect gunshots which will be heard throughout the whole school? Are they expecting the world's quietest silencer?) And I put in quotes, because gunshots here seems like a thinly veiled way to try and finagle around illegally recording people.
They also invade the bathrooms with 'vape' detectors that smell the children at all times to make sure they are in compliance.
Fun fact, vape detectors are bypassed by blowing through a sweatshirt or hoody, or by running hot water in the sink.
I could see sound being drowned out from all the bending hallways/closed doors, I remember being in pretty big schools
Interesting though I've seen these spiral dots before but didn't know what it was
"why the fuck does a school need this to detect gunshots which will be heard throughout the whole school?"
To establish a timeline (and a sense of 'due diligence') for the inevitable deposition.
It's more about addressing management/stakeholder anxiety, and helping with blame/liability issues.
Society generally puts maximal responsibility on school administrators for the well-being of students, so it should not be surprising that they will take maximal measures in response to that expectation. They are ultimately risk mitigators, not privacy ethicists, what would you expect them to do?
To be clear, this is an article about COLLEGE students, the vast majority of whom are legal adults.
It's not the same as first grade students being monitored by their teachers, regardless of what sibling commentors have to say.
I'm just saying administrators would not take these measures if they didn't see less risk in taking them than in not.
Anecdotally, I see Xennial/Millennial 'helicopter' parents expect universities to take broad, often intrusive measures for the well-being of their children, and their (legally) adult children tend to go along with that expectation.
The administrators could educate and urge the parents and school board to vote against this faux risk mitigation.
School boards have increasingly been taken over by people actively looking to dismantle our education systems. This is a battle that has to be won on multiple fronts to make an impact.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/right-wing-extremists-schools...
Right wingers have been saying the same thing about left leaning school boards for the last decade.
Seems like they are saying the left is trying to change the curriculum, not dismantle the education system. The push toward privitization and homeschooling is pretty lopsided.
Not be authoritarian weirdos.
They're expected to have complete control of the students and are held responsible like they have complete control.
How the hell else are they supposed to act? I genuinely don't blame the schools here. I blame every single person who expects the schools to hold all encompassing control over a group of kids.
> They're expected to have complete control of the students
Since when?
Since about 1999 or 2000. Columbine really shifted people's attitudes.
Previous discussion (4 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27453800
This of course is about Covid, but the rise of LLMs is another point where students are supposed to become less private, opening up their devices to monitoring software.
I think that there is exactly one correct direction to take here, which is that direct human interaction is the most valuable thing, both in learning and in keeping students mentally and physically healthy. Every single surrogate for that inevitably will make all of these aspects worse.
Well, we do have to stay safe out there. We're in a pandemic.
It amuses me that my rave groups already did contact tracing for respiratory illnesses before the pandemic and perhaps because of the large Asian friend group I’m part of we wore masks in more normal contexts when we had a cold.
To be honest, most of the people designing the interventions are just generally short of mental horsepower and strong in self-belief. So they come up with novel approaches that aren’t really required. The fact that there are students who aren’t pro-social on campus complicated things but that’s a self-imposed problem.
It can’t be helped: this is what happens with The Sort. If they were smarter they wouldn’t be college admins.
> won't just disappear when the pandemic subsided.
Yeah I'm pretty sure they don't have to wear heart monitors now.
I wonder how far the overlap is in the Venn diagram of people who thought the pandemic would lead to an "Orwellian nightmare" and the people who voted for Trump and support DOGE, ICE and the administration's oppression of political wrongthink in universities. I'd bet it's an almost perfect circle.
Does privacy even exist anywhere? I assume that my work computer has a key logger to track if I ever type something nasty. Potentially records me to see if I am using an above average amount of profanity while coding.
I'll just leave this here
Also Wired, in 2006: <https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/>
This article…the kind of technology described herein, and other places which gets cast in a suspicious light, is actually quite useful.
The problem with the information such technology affords, however, is that any primitive-minded human may misuse or abuse what they get out of it.
The human mind has not wholly updated beyond family or tribe level self-preservation, but I guess some results have yielded from prior waves of cultural evolution. The only practical advice is that one should try to build in safeguards against abuse and misuse.
The US Surveilled Student
I can't imagine such ideas being floated elsewhere. Certainly not without significant protest.
So much for the land of the free.
Working in a German university. I had students in my courses where we noticed after two semesters that they aren't even studying here (not as if that was a problem, tuition is free and they were adding good spirits to the courses).
And with "noticed" I mean they told us.
The Surveilled Child, The Surveilled Citizen, ...
Living in a Smart City.
There's an app for you.
What's so "smart" about these phones, anyways?
"I've got one that can see" -"They Live" John Carpenter
(2021) btw
You mean yesterday?
What actually changed from 2021 to now besides GenAI?
public perception of covid changed from The Apocalypse to The Flu 2
> College officials stress that a machine, not a person, is listening in,
“Okay, but that’s worse.”
Not only is it worse, but I doubt it is even true in any meaningful sense. Even if the humans aren't 'listening in' and only the student gets the feedback directly, surely there are logs that contain at the very least metadata which a human can very much 'listen in' on and absent regulation with heavy penalties, will listen in on either individually or in aggregate and which could be hacked and sold.
>that a machine
Yea, I don't know where that idea came from. Maybe the Boomer generation when machines didn't have practically unlimited storage and internet access where that data then can be crawled over by countless algorithms to judge your life and how you'll live from now on.
The worst part is the algorithms don't even have to be correct. A ton of algorithms, designed to find transgressions, likely judged by purchasers by how many they find. Eventually they are relied upon and are standard for ass covering. But people don't understand how they work so give them a level of trust you wouldn't extend to a person doing the same task.
I think this kind of thinking must be the same kind that believes that bulk data collection isn't a "search" until the data is accessed by a human.