Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 560 posts

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#51

Post by lm28469 »

turk73 wrote: post #16
mattlondon wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

I'd rather just shut down the schools than give up any more rights. If you haven't noticed, our Federal government is totally out of control and has gone rogue and I don't think it's a very good idea to cede any further power or individual rights to that monster. The right to bear arms was paid for in blood and not just once. Good men laid down their lives so we could have these rights. That a few kooks will shoot up…

Education is a right, and imho it should rank higher than guns.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#52

Post by nieksand »

adamnemecek wrote: post #12

I dont get how the school can justify this.

People's views of the world have been drastically skewed by the news industry.

Consider how much news coverage was given to the Las Vegas mass shooting. That resulted in 58 dead and 413 wounded.

Compare that to how much national coverage is spent on car accidents. About 40,000 Americans per year are killed by cars. That's about two Las Vegas massacres worth of dead each and every day of the year.

The news industry thrives on sensation. Politicians don't even wait for the blood to dry before leveraging drama for their cause. The schools are now just mirroring the public's ill-formed opinion. This is all great if you are preparing your kids to be cogs in a surveillance state. It is less great if you care about freedom.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#53

Post by basilgohar »

leggomylibro wrote: post #39

My Aunt has a child in early middle school - years 6 through 9 or so, for people outside the US. Not only does the poor kid have a school-issued laptop with heavy monitoring tools installed on it, but they are also required to bring a smartphone to school! My Aunt had made them tape over the laptop's webcam and explained that everything the kid typed could probably be seen by the school, but she was still concerned a…

This is absolutely horrible. I feel so bad for your family.

There's already a plethora of studies about the negative impacts screen time may have on early child development and the development of their brains in particular. But even from the observable social aspect, the interactions with our smart devices with notifications always vying for our attention and flashing widgets distracting us, I'm really worried for kids who already have struggles with focus and attention.

I know that we get tired of the "sky is falling" rhetoric, but I will just point out that many aspects of modern life that have become "normal" for us are still bad. Sedentary lifestyle, short attention spans, need for constant entertainment, less time spent outdoors, larger processed food consumption – the health and social problems associated with all of these are just accepted now, and a couple of generations ago we didn't have them (at least, not to the same degree).

Was everything perfect before? No, of course not. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. We can adopt technology and progress responsibly, rather than w=recklessly as we have for the past few decades.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#54

Post by giancarlostoro »

turk73 wrote: post #16
mattlondon wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

I'd rather just shut down the schools than give up any more rights. If you haven't noticed, our Federal government is totally out of control and has gone rogue and I don't think it's a very good idea to cede any further power or individual rights to that monster. The right to bear arms was paid for in blood and not just once. Good men laid down their lives so we could have these rights. That a few kooks will shoot up…

> The right to bear arms was paid for in blood and not just once.

And worse, gun restrictions only benefit criminals. There's plenty of people who legally own firearms and protect their homes and their property legally. They also avoid plenty of crime since criminals tend to run when a gun is pulled on them especially in stand your ground states.

They've tried banning everything in England and criminals will still kill people with just about anything. First it's the guns, then knives, then machetes. You can run over people, are you gonna make cars illegal too?

People who want to hurt people also don't care what laws there are, they can buy guns illegally.

Worse yet, depending on where you live, if something happens in your home, it's a lot safer to have a gun than to wait for cops to come to draw the chalk lines on you and your family.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#55

Post by ptah »

systemtest wrote: post #46
mattlondon wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

Or just fix the underlaying issue. Switzerland has 2 million guns on 8 million citizens. Yet no school shootings. Why don't they have school shootings and can we apply the Swiss system to the United States?

it's not as easy to get guns in switzerland as in the US

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#56

Post by seany »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #45
viridian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very unpopular opinion w.r.t. to America. Gallup conducts a firearms poll every year, and the closest thing to a total ban question is a total ban on handguns. "Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?" should be: 29 should not be: 70 no opinion: 1

Isn't that the law in most (all?) states now in USA, that you need a license to possess a gun legally (ie need to be an authorised person)? This sounds more like, in common with most polls, it shows how the manner of asking a question alters the answers given? I'd be really interested in how the poll would go without "the police and other", and with using a construction based on "allow ..." instead of "ban ...".

> Isn't that the law in most (all?) states now in USA, that you need a license to possess a gun legally (ie need to be an authorised person)?

Not really. Only a few states have FOID or FID license requirements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_United_States_...

You might be thinking of license to _carry_ which every state has, though some of have been making progress in removing that requirement as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#57

Post by foldr »

homonculus1 wrote: post #50
TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is not just the actual risk, but the perception of risk. People deserve to not feel like they are going to be shot when they show up to an educational institution, and that feeling has been withering away lately

That's the vast majority of the problem, to be specific, as that perception is far out of proportion to the actual risk. So address the fearmongering and contextualize how rare these incidents are, insteading of blaming gun owners and further eroding civil liberties.

School shootings are unacceptably frequent in the US, regardless of how infrequent they are in an absolute sense. Many countries go decades without a single school shooting.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#58

Post by lm28469 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #54
turk73 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather just shut down the schools than give up any more rights. If you haven't noticed, our Federal government is totally out of control and has gone rogue and I don't think it's a very good idea to cede any further power or individual rights to that monster. The right to bear arms was paid for in blood and not just once. Good men laid down their lives so we could have these rights. That a few kooks will shoot up…

> The right to bear arms was paid for in blood and not just once. And worse, gun restrictions only benefit criminals. There's plenty of people who legally own firearms and protect their homes and their property legally. They also avoid plenty of crime since criminals tend to run when a gun is pulled on them especially in stand your ground states. They've tried banning everything in England and criminals will still ki…

> And worse, gun restrictions only benefit criminals. There's plenty of people who legally own firearms and protect their homes and their property legally.

The real question is why are the US ranking so high in violent crime and murder rates compared to other developed countries. You shouldn't feel the need to "protect" your home in the #1 power in the world.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#59

Post by swiley »

leggomylibro wrote: post #39

My Aunt has a child in early middle school - years 6 through 9 or so, for people outside the US. Not only does the poor kid have a school-issued laptop with heavy monitoring tools installed on it, but they are also required to bring a smartphone to school! My Aunt had made them tape over the laptop's webcam and explained that everything the kid typed could probably be seen by the school, but she was still concerned a…

Have they considered home schooling?

Often modern home schooling looks more like private school (because almost no one actually does it home, they send their kids to parent run “co-ops”) and you won’t have to deal with most of this stupidity.

The Co-op my sister went to banned smartphones inside the building. IMO that was a little extreme and made logistics more difficult than they needed to be but it meant they just focused on school work.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#60

Post by ptero »

krilly wrote: post #29
rahuldottech wrote: post #20

THIS IS NOT OKAY. We can't have children being used to constant surveillance and accepting this as a part of life. It sets them up for so many problems in the future, where they won't understand the serious implications of constant tracking and surveillance. And sure, nothing too bad comes out of this stuff right now in most of the world, but have you seen China? The minute a government decides to do so, all that dat…

Which bit of this are you upset with specifically? Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades. The clear backpacks are silly I'll admit, and also pointless. I agree that kids getting conditioned to be okay with surveillance is bad, but this is all coming from the private sector right now. In China, you now have to submit your face to be scanned…

> Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

What country are you talking about? Honest question, just curious. I am in the US, but even today many small and medium sized companies do not monitor internet (block parts, sure, but not monitor) and 10 years ago even large companies did not do it.

Post reply on HN