A large fraction of student borrowers are not repaying their loans, as documented at https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/10/who-bo... . In a private loan market, lenders would monitor how students are doing in college when deciding what interest rates to charge each semester or whether to make further loans at all. This would encourage college students to attend class and work harder.
Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
81–90 of 293 posts
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless they are doing deep packet inspection or analyzing your browser through a wifi login portal, I think an iPhone's MAC randomization should be able to defeat WiFi-based tracking (barring WiFi-as-radar, those are much more difficult to evade, there is a ton of metadata you can collect from stuff like breathing, gait and heart rate etc. Cross reference with CCTV to prevent false positives.).
If you are 'logged in' into a wifi network, then MAC address randomization is turned off for that network and the iPhone gives the real MAC address of the device. It's only used in non connected scenarios such as scanning for available networks. Another bad thing is how iBeacon bluetooth is something you can't turn off specifically on an iPhone if you have bluetooth on in any capacity. And there is no per app privacy…
Oh that's terrible, I also thought the randomization is constantly on. Is this the case for Android and the desktop operating systems too? Windows, OS X, Ubuntu etc.?
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not hard. No dedicated device required, either. It requires reverse engineering which data in being transferred to the school. This likely occurs using a simple HTTP request. Or series of requests. Copy the data from that HTTP request. Then replicate those HTTP requests.
That works only if the app authors have no basic idea of security
Good news: that's very likely the case for the system described in the article.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion? Is it actually _better_, or does it just maximise specific metrics that you're able to easily quantify? More to the point - do you want to _be_ that person? I'm glad that my professors were human beings and not automatons - I probably wouldn't have done we…
We could speak the same way about police to make it obvious why some people don’t like the double edge of discretion. Isn’t it such a burden that police have to wear cameras? It’s probably much harder to exercise any executive discretion that way, let alone have any natural conversation, especially when people may demand lawsuits and firings over such footage. Must police be very equally kind to both white and black…
My interactions with British professors are not in any way comparable to what I know about the US police!
It's a really weird comparison to me. Perhaps US profs are way more uptight in general? I'm not really sure how to respond to that, to be honest.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#85Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics:
First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional private non-profit schools. For-profit schools are much less scrupulous and should not be regarded as trustworthy in this respect)
Beyond this, students are apprised of these uses of data with the ability to opt out. This is done as upfront as we can, very "in your face", though the tendency to click "agree" to something without reading, even very short and to the point, is of course always an issue.
Finally, the data collected is extremely useful. I cannot emphasize that enough. It is extremely useful in helping students be more successful. And it's not used in terms of surveillance. It's used pretty much exclusive in understanding the patterns the coincide with success and those that coincide with failure, dropout, academic struggling, and so on. In short, it is used to proactively intervene with students at risk rather than wait for it to be too late, e.g., final grades are in and no tutoring intervention is possible. A recent use had me using Xgboost to examine patterns of LMS usage to determine students at risk of early drop out. It worked, and we can now identify about one third of early drop outs with practically no effort and almost no false positives and work with those students to address there problems before they go too far.
I'm sure privacy maximalists will not be satisfied with the above, but really, within the realm of data comprehensive I idividual data collection, I'm not aware of any business, much less an entire industry, that treats such data as responsibly as this, and that really is concerned with using it only to further the best interests of it's constituents. Obviously I'm biased. That probably means things are not as rosy as I envision. But I think it is nonetheless an important and valid synopsis of the issue.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#86Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#87> The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed An appropriate dream for a college administrator. But a travesty for creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists. I’d be curious. Would these same administrators object to their timeliness being similarly measured? Qua…
> An appropriate dream for a college administrator. But a travesty for creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists.
And teachers.
While there are some conformist "I am always right, don't stir the shit" authoritarian teachers, there are many who rely in part on students to question and hone the teacher's own expertise, especially people who teach in rapidly changing fields. This is healthy, I think, and many of my best teachers (in and out of structured school) have been like this.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, @droithomme's comment put me onto that to, I didn't realise it was classed as a personality type not just a form of government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personalit... this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. The book is here https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-A... the comments are an interesting study alone.
> this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. Throwing a label on it doesn’t make it a bad thing. Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. If everyone just let everyone else do whatever they wanted, humans wouldn’t have gotten very far. Of course, freedom to choose does a lot of good too. There is a bal…
> Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. If everyone just let everyone else do whatever they wanted, humans wouldn’t have gotten very far.
The first and third quotes sentences are probably true, but how in the world does authority or authoritarianism give people motivation? Or do you mean that it substitutes for internal motivation the motivation of an external threat? This is probably true, but it is rarely in the state's, or the authority's, interest to maximise each person's potential individually; the authority will rather prefer to maximise each person's contribution to the authority's good, which likely involves forcing each person into a channel that (for at least some and probably many) poorly serves him or her as an individual.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#89Real question is, what are we educating people to be?
Compliant, and then time permitting, students.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#90> The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed An appropriate dream for a college administrator. But a travesty for creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists. I’d be curious. Would these same administrators object to their timeliness being similarly measured? Qua…
Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists". The creator of the app is a guy who has a restraining order because of violent threats he made against a school he was kicked out of as coach. Based on his history that the article touches on, it seems possible he's a controlling authoritarian sociopath. Why anyone wou…
> Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists".
Surely on HN at least we can be free of the idea that only first-rate colleges have (a substantial quantity of) students with such exceptional potential. (I would go even farther and deny that there is any particularly strong correlation between 'rate' of the school and future potential of its students, except in the self-selecting sense that a Harvard degree opens doors that a community-college degree doesn't.)