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Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

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Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#131
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

Your connection with the AP is bound to a particular MAC. You could randomize it per AP, but you can't like, randomize the MAC for every packet.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#132

> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and e…

The proliferation of data platforms and fancy tools makes it easy to build dashboards, etc.

One former colleague is doing a lot of research and statistics gathering by correlating use of campus swipe cards to grades and other academic warning signs.

If they detect that you’re out late, using soda machines at 3am, bugging out for the weekend, etc they may trigger some of sort intervention.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, it's a concise rejection of the worldview that privacy means privacy from others, not privacy from me, and that students are interchangeable units subject not to any consideration of ethics but only performance.

Where is that worldview evidenced in the post you were responding to? The poster seemed extremely cognizant of privacy concerns, and was defending a limited collection of specific data under very narrow circumstances for similarly delimited purposes. Put another way, saying "I think some specific data collection is ethical" is not the same as saying "all data collection I do is ethical, others may not be ethical". Th…

The OP's main concern about privacy was that "third parties" might get the data. There is no recognition of the fact that a student might deserve or expect privacy from the school, only from some nebulous Other who is certain not to treat it with the great respect sure to be afforded it by the Benevolent and Definitely Not-For-Profit university. There is no question of whether this totalizing monitoring of a life is an affront to dignity or whether it normalizes authoritarian power structures, only that it is "extremely useful", that is, it subjects pure quantities to optimization.

There is already a lower bound on the level of acceptable data collection set by normal human interaction. There does not however appear to be any upper bound whatsoever suggested by the argument in the OP. As long as the data is not sold and it continues to be useful (ie. the Mathusian race has not yet reached the bottom), no aspect of human life appears to be too sacred to be put into into the optimizer.

(I am not wott, in case you did not notice.)

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#134
...so does this mean that if you buy a Librem 5, you'll be automatically considered absent and will recieve a lower grade? I can't imagine the apps these colleges are using would be compatible.

I realize this might seem like a lower concern compared to everything else, but it strikes me as one more way that people are permanently locked into the major platforms.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#135

> 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…

Administrators are leaches, at least homeless people pay by the disrespect they receive but administrators suck away resources and hurt people while everyone acts like they actually contribute something to the world. Professors lack the appropriate autonomy to teach and students lack the appropriate autonomy to learn and all the while administrators are seeing what different deals they can make with these software companies to wedge one more thing onto everyone’s machine in order to gain more control.

I’ve been told all this extra tuition money isn’t going to professors or research, it’s just going to administration; they are what we’ve mortgaged the future for.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#136

> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and e…

> Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance.

I attended Caltech (BS '01) and given that they allowed us to take exams home with us, it would have been surprising if a professor took attendance. This was part of the overall honor code (http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/explore/about-caltech/hono...) that looking back, I really appreciated as a student.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#137

Earlier 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.

The book is pretty well derided as political propaganda masquerading as science. It's the same as the modern day "scientific" view that all Trump voters are mentally ill and Clinton voters are not.

That's not to say it doesn't offer valuable insights, though - nor does it comment on the validity of further empirical and theoretical[0] work on authoritarianism. I've found that many people who make such a comparison both misunderstand Adorno, and many don't understand the context in which the book was written (counting Adorno's experience of the Holocaust) nor the actual content. The nature of authoritarianism, for Arendt and Adorno, goes deeper than personalities in the modern democratic state.

For what it's worth, though...

>In his “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality” (a text that was not included in the published 1950 work), Adorno laid out a series of objections that call into question the notion of an underlying personality structure; they suggest that under the modern conditions of the late-capitalist culture industry, the individual as a psychic unity is beginning to dissolve. This dissenting perspective deserves notice, especially in an age that has seen the reemergence of authoritarian politics in the United States.

By Adorno's reckoning, we have authoritarianism in both Trump and Clinton.[1]

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344371877214...

[1] "After first sketching Adorno’s conception of the “authoritarian personality,” with the help of Sándor Ferenczi’s concept of the “identification with the aggressor,” the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno’s changed orientation: that “fascism” or “authoritarianism” maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left."

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#138
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cutoff, and any position of it will lead to complaints. Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff. If you have a good reason for an extension, you c…

I've been an instructor for CS courses before so I know what you mean. I never made deadlines anything but absolutely final, which is appropriately not unlike a lot of other things in life --- from what I've heard from others, any leniency just tends to cause more whining. Someone who waits until the last second to do something is not going to do any better if given a tiny bit more time (nevermind the question of how…

I had one professor in college who went hard in the other direction—she told the class "I don't care if you turn in assignments late", and gave no limit on how late you could be.

As a student, it was, well, nice. It was true that it was a bit harder to be motivated to finish a paper right away, but it also made the process far less stressful. When I turned in papers I thought they were the best they could be.

Of course, I'm sure there were at least some students in her classes who ignored everything until the end of the term or something, and were quite stressed out at the end...

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#139
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, delays lead to logistical difficulties. Until every copy of an assignment is submitted, you can't release solutions, assign grades, talk about the problems in lectures or recitations, or really give any feedback whatsoever. I've had excellent courses that ran on your system, but in those cases they had it completely standardized from year to year, and even automated grading systems.

This issue only comes up if you have a low caliber class where homework is nontrivial part of the grade.

My graduate classes were 100% homework-based almost without exception. When you're doing hard enough physics, it doesn't make sense to demand people do anything nontrivial in an hour, like in a typical exam. Real problems take at least whole days of thought.
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