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

theguardian.com

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

#481

Post by asdff »

shadowgovt wrote: post #81
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…

The constant use of smartphones has become a pretty central part of US culture. Shouldn't school reflect the environment the student is being taught to live in?

Ahh yes. I remember back in my day I was sent home if I didn't show up to school with my rotary telephone and a fresh copy of the Times under my arm. Essential components of US culture, after all.

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

#482

Post by asdff »

detritus wrote: post #343
superkuh wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation. Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.

> people hate being watched in the old days we'd have God watching over our conscience. now we have cctv.

Crime never occurred in the good old god fearing days, huh?

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

#483

Post by mnm1 »

umvi wrote: post #99
GuiA wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still 6 times more guns per person in the US than in Switzerland. Looking at the numbers also shows that Switzerland is far from being an outlier in any way, so I'm not sure why the Swiss system is more interesting than the Austrian system or Swedish system in that regard. There are just way too many guns in the US (i.e. "it's just way too easy to get a gun in the US"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimat…

The vast majority of those guns are sitting around harmlessly in gun collector's lockers. US has a mental illness problem. At some point, a societal sickness entered the country. A sickness of nihilism and hopelessness. A sickness where (mostly men) feel lonely and unloved and powerless to change their futures. A sickness where hatred for peers is harbored for years until it festers and explodes out in a violent way.…

I agree, but it's not a currently defined mental illness so we should be more clear on terminology. What you're talking about is a cultural issue. It's massive and real. It's not mental health, however. Fewer than 5% of shootings in the US are caused by people with mental health issues.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/#!po=0....

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

#484

Post by dang »

1996 wrote: post #321
yaur wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I helped build a product a while back that helped those owners give access to the local police. Depending on what the owner wanted to do this could be just the street cameras or everything.

Do you sleep well at night?

No personal attacks please.

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

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

#485

Post by asdff »

officeplant wrote: post #380
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…

I was born in the 80s and my dad was a network engineer with a hobby of privacy invasion. All computers in our house were open to remote login from him and all of our emails had to be through an email server he ran out of our home. Constant surveillance backfired on him in that it taught us how to be increasingly good at hiding activities and covering our tracks. Obviously that doesn't make up for the downsides of co…

When I was in highschool flash games were rising to prominance, and the admins naturally banned our favorite websites from the school network. We weren't savy enough for VPNs but we used proxies.

At this point I have a pretty flippant attitude to my private data because of how much is out there. Telemarketers know my number and personal details. Spam emails do too. Even snail mail junk.

My info has been bought and sold dozens of times by now, probably originally from Verizon as telecoms openly engage in this practice. VPNs leaking my info is the least of my worries, the cat is already far out of the bag.

However, what can these companies even do? Not like I engage with their targeted advertisements or junk mail. If my identity was actually stolen, credit card numbers sold, it would probably only be mildly annoying for a month or two rather than some catastrophic thing.

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

#486

Post by asdff »

ptero wrote: post #60
krilly wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I was in high school, the admin regularly blacklisted new flash game sites as we started discovering and using them regularly on the school network.

Monitoring is done everywhere and has been done for a long time. Whether or not they check it depends on how lazy IT is.

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

#487

Post by asdff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #299
ryanmercer wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They flag private emails as well, is that not a violation of privacy? No. If you are using a school/employer provided email account you should be using them for school/work stuff. If you are using a school/employer device, you should be using them for school/employer stuff. If you want to tell Jack or Jane that they fuel your fire and you want to do sexy time or that you violently soiled your pants and wondered if t…

Sure. Step 1, replace everything with a service. Step 2, make half of these free and employer- or government-provided, because people don't have time and money for dealing with subscription crap. Step 3, announce that if people want privacy, they should use their own devices.

Isn't that what is done essentially? The school provides the tech on loan and a school email account, just like companies do. And just like companies do, you keep work shit on work shit and personal shit on personal shit.

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

#488

Post by asdff »

ip26 wrote: post #375
Thriptic wrote: post #155

Poor, emotion driven risk management as usual. School shootings kill very few people per year and are rare events (especially in places that can afford this tech) despite what the New York Times would have you believe. Why not focus efforts on things that actually do kill young people, namely: * Car crashes (teach people to drive more defensively) * Suicides (provide better mental health services) * Violence that occ…

Why not focus efforts on things... Automobiles are something of a sacred cow. Even outside your neighborhood school, prioritizing pedestrians & cyclists, traffic calming, and the like are an uphill battle because it is inconvenient to drivers.

I've seen schools with underground tunnel crossings as well as pedestrian overpasses. However, if you research why these piece of infrastructure were built, usually it's a sad story of a kid getting killed by a car which made everyone suddenly realize how absurdly dangerous crossings are for small children. Safety infrastructure is built with blood.

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

#489

Post by asdff »

TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #22
umvi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: basically no one dies by guns in schools so don't even bother with clear backpacks.

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

You are far more likely to die crossing the street to school than having some homegrown terrorist appear one day.

A 4 year old girl was killed crossing the street to school in my neighborhood just over a month ago, horrible tragedy:

https://laist.com/2019/10/22/pedestrian_deaths_vision_zero_p...

This article shows it's not only LA that is failing at vision zero. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/vision-zero-d...

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

#490

Post by asdff »

grecy wrote: post #368
School-Cotton wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that 1 person in the US died per year by getting hit by stray golf balls, and 10 people per year in France. (I'm not saying this is true; just imagine). It might be true that France has by far the highest stray-golf-ball death rate in the world. But this wouldn't mean it is a significant cause of mortality, or an important object of public policy.

Except that we're talking about innocent children being gunned down at school by their fellow citizens. Utterly preventable and disgusting. You might not think it's a big deal, but the rest of the world is horrified by it. (Also your example is very poor - you should use per capita statistics so countries of different populations can be meaningfully compared.)

Aweful, horrible, tragic, but a sensational statistic at the end of the day. Crosswalks and the cars that ignore them are a more serious killer, but regulated into local news and not international headline coverage. Pedestrians die every 90 minutes in the U.S. due to cars.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-09-15/pedest...

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