Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids • Hacker News Board

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#11

Post by markovbot » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

fetus8 wrote: post #3

grawprog wrote: post #2

>GoGuardian, a company that monitors students’ internet searches, that a student was doing a Google search for “how to kill myself” late one evening. How is it monitoring searches done at home in the evening?

Mobile Device Managers (MDM) and a proxy. Route the device' s searches back to the school's network and monitor via the proxy. I worked in a school district for a couple years where we did this. Certain keywords in searches would prompt email notifications too.

> Certain keywords in searches would prompt email notifications too.

That is so unbelievably disgusting. This kind of abusive invasion of privacy should be a crime.

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#12

Post by lovich » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #8

gruez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if your sibling/classmates decided to "prank" you by searching up certain terms when you're not looking.

in general, you are responsible for whatever is done with your account/machine, authorized or not. if you are doing even the bare minimum to secure the computer, you should not be vulnerable to these kind of pranks from siblings/classmates. if it's unreasonable to expect a child to clear this bar, then they are not yet responsible enough to be entrusted with their own computing device.

That's not been true for almost every device I can think of other than firearms/explosives. If someone steals your car and crashes it are you responsible? If not why are computers different?

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#13

Post by red-indian » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

A few years ago I found out my nephew's Kindergarten had implemented fingerprint scanners for all students. They get to scan their fingerprint when checking in or out of lunch, going to the bathroom, arriving and leaving school.

Promoted as a safety feature to ensure they knew where the kids were and that they were ok. I was asked to go in with my brother and talk to them about it. They said it was all ok because that the actual fingerprints aren't stored on the system, only information derived from the fingerprints, the system wasn't costing them anything because some Edu-Tech company was paying for it as a test, no other persons had complained about the tech, not one, we were the first, and it's kind of weird that we are opposed to children's safety.

We asked that my nephew not participate in the trial and they agreed, though he reported after that he was often forced to be scanned anyway.

A couple years later I asked another parent about the fingerprint scanners and they didn't know what I was talking about, so either they were removed, or parents are simply not reading the notices they are sent home and often even asked to sign.

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#14

Post by defen » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #8

gruez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if your sibling/classmates decided to "prank" you by searching up certain terms when you're not looking.

in general, you are responsible for whatever is done with your account/machine, authorized or not. if you are doing even the bare minimum to secure the computer, you should not be vulnerable to these kind of pranks from siblings/classmates. if it's unreasonable to expect a child to clear this bar, then they are not yet responsible enough to be entrusted with their own computing device.

> in general, you are responsible for whatever is done with your account/machine, authorized or not. if you are doing even the bare minimum to secure the computer, you should not be vulnerable to these kind of pranks from siblings/classmates.

This makes sense in a corporate or military environment, but is simply not reasonable for home use. You're claiming that one can never allow anyone else to have unsupervised physical access to the machine (regardless of whether it's locked, powered off, etc)

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#15

Post by ASalazarMX » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

red-indian wrote: post #13

A few years ago I found out my nephew's Kindergarten had implemented fingerprint scanners for all students. They get to scan their fingerprint when checking in or out of lunch, going to the bathroom, arriving and leaving school. Promoted as a safety feature to ensure they knew where the kids were and that they were ok. I was asked to go in with my brother and talk to them about it. They said it was all ok because tha…

> They said it was all ok because that the actual fingerprints aren't stored on the system, only information derived from the fingerprints

I hate this blatantly flawed reasoning. The data collection is the problem, and it doesn't matter if you store pictures of fingers/faces/irises/ids or just their post-process signatures, it's still data collection.

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#16

Post by Mathnerd314 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

It seems like the product was originally an internet filter for pornography etc. but now the companies are competing on features. The main one is the profanity filter but they've started using AI to detect other things like self-harm threats etc.

The monitoring seems mostly limited to school laptops and cloud services, so presumably students who don't like it can use their phones if they have them. The companies all have more invasive home products but those report to the parents rather than the school.

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#17

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

markovbot wrote: post #11

fetus8 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile Device Managers (MDM) and a proxy. Route the device' s searches back to the school's network and monitor via the proxy. I worked in a school district for a couple years where we did this. Certain keywords in searches would prompt email notifications too.

> Certain keywords in searches would prompt email notifications too. That is so unbelievably disgusting. This kind of abusive invasion of privacy should be a crime.

In a perverted sense, this is an opportunity to teach the children a very important lesson: if you're using a machine or network owned and operated by your employer (or, by extension, your school), then you should be scrupulous about only using it for work (or school) business.

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#18

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #4

They will probably receiprocate this amount of distrust at some point in their lives. But go ahead, treat children like criminals. Perhaps some will even do a good old school shooting and you could finally be proud of yourselves that you have seen it coming. It would let the industry flourish like nothing else. "Schools feel massive pressure to demonstrate that they’re doing something to keep kids safe" - No kidding.…

This sounds more cynical than constructive to me.

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#19

Post by SolarNet » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

I mean this is the new (Omniviolence future article from a few days ago) world, they might as well get used to it now...

Re: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

#20

Post by fetus8 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #17

markovbot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certain keywords in searches would prompt email notifications too. That is so unbelievably disgusting. This kind of abusive invasion of privacy should be a crime.

In a perverted sense, this is an opportunity to teach the children a very important lesson: if you're using a machine or network owned and operated by your employer (or, by extension, your school), then you should be scrupulous about only using it for work (or school) business.

Very firm agree. These devices were school owned, and technically "government" owned property. They were not handed out to the students to use however they pleased. They were to be utilized for digital text books, curriculum, and ancillary education resources that were designed by the teachers and administrators of the district.

We locked the devices down so that student's couldn't get to certain kinds of apps, parts of the web, and had to be used with school issued Apple IDs. We (as the school district) were wholly responsible for what the student's did on these school owned devices. It's no different than monitoring what goes on in a school's computer lab, except the iPads are mobile devices.