Live data from Hacker News

Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

ssd.eff.org

81–90 of 95 posts

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#81
post #24
post #10

My schools tried to require school owned apple equipment that both restricted actions (couldn’t message with parents or email) and monitored all activity, even when used from home. I forced my own equipment and they tried to install and reinstall various spyware throughout the year. It seems like rather than proposing a basic system of assignments and material and grades, they are trying to treat as a wholly owned ec…

Surprising that schools are requiring additional certs to be added a a device for internet access. This enables "keybridging" mitm attacks on any TLS connection that trusts the cert. Best load a 3rd-party browser and install it locally, rather than compromise the whole device. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/01/08/the-turktrust-ss...

An Australian state has intentions to do this soon:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/ie8d45vk35bwimg/Filtered+Inte...

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#82

> “If authority figures for youth say constant surveillance is OK, what happens when a romantic partner wants access to every message on their phone? Or an employer wants your social media password? Invasive monitoring isn’t acceptable, no matter who tries to do it, and personal privacy matters.” I think that it is even worse than that. In a decade or two, we are going to learn the many cases of sexual abuse that thi…

I agree with your point, however, I think the majority of teachers and even lecturers are simply uneducated, when it comes to avoiding surveillance of their students. When presented these issues, most shrugg it off, because they fear having to actually do something about it themselves. They carelessly throw away privacy of their students by suggesting to use the usual suspects for voice and video chat. In my opinion in this age of technology, getting educated about the issues here should be a mandatory aspect of the training of all people, who want to be teachers.

Then there is this illusion, of setting up something oneself, as an institution, being super difficult.

Schools could easily rent a decent server, costing something like 40-80 dollar/euro per month and protect their students. They do have an computer/IT/informatics teacher, who studied computer stuff, hopefully. If not, they could hire someone to do it, the country / state could finance it, or they could even get a talented student to set it up for them. The setup itself is really not that difficult and takes an afternoon or without much prior knowledge perhaps 2 days. And really, if it is a money question, just ask parents to donate and the school will be covered. No unsolvable problem at all.

Universities easily have the cash to rent servers and usually have IT people in employment as well, who manage all sorts of stuff. It should be an easy task for them to set up a privacy preserving text, voice and video chat.

Then you have the problem, that I experienced myself, when I wanted to make it happen for schools, contacting someone I know at a school: There is bureaucracy in the way, which demands a uniform solution for schools. Which results in using a centralized service provider, because the whole country (!) does not manage to set up the infrastructure for its students. Just imagine that. A whole country, incapable of setting up privacy preserving solutions for students, all the while everyone is whining about bad online teaching during the pandemic. Somehow this makes me doubt their motivation and willingness to solve the problem.

Unfortunately most people are not informed about the issues and choose to continue being uninformed that way. They do not want to deal with ethical questions and rather want to throw money at the problem, by purchasing licenses for surveillance products.

All it takes is people caring.

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#83
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really surprising. Breaking PKI by installing fake CA certs so that IT can MITM every connection is now an Enterprise Best Practice (tm). In case the sarcasm isn't evident, please read the above as sarcastic. I detest admins who do this.

There is a fine line between doing this to protect IP and actual privacy abuse - and as we're treading it's important to remember how important context is. This is absolutely a best practice in some corporate environments for DLP. There's no better way to ensure sensitive data isn't being exported via TLS connections. There is no reason, however, to do this to a child's device. Their teacher and their parents should…

> This is absolutely a best practice in some corporate environments for DLP.

No, it's not, and this attitude is a major cause of resentment among technical employees.

The "DLP" industry, in general, is a solution in search of a cause. If you can't trust your employees, you'll never be able to stop the determined ones.

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#84
post #79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Millions of Germans thought that they had nothing to hide, back in 1930. Until they had. Well this is just plain a massive rewrite of history. The Nazi's were not in anyway covert about who they were going after, and they enjoyed broad popular support to do it. "Privacy" doesn't mean a whole lot when the actual metric of oppression was "we're going to grab everyone who goes into that church over there".

It is a very valid argument against data collection for the sake of data collection, which is closely related. Can't find the exact source, but there was this story about some French (?) town keeping a list of Jews in their documents, for no real reason. It's a piece of data - better to have it than not, right? Might be useful some day. Nazis certainly thought so when they occupied the town and got hold of the list.

The Nazi's weren't enabled by a database. They wouldn't have been stopped by the lack of one. And they certainly didn't care whether or not the the people they killed were actually Jews.

Fascism targets "the other".

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#85
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Myth #1. “If you did nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide." My usual reply to that is: "ok, what is your salary, and what is in your bank account?"

What if someone then said "I won't tell you of course, but I don't mind if the bank, tax collectors, the police or the govt knows. They already know everything about everyone anyways. I have nothing to hide from them"

Then they're just selective about the hiding and who they trust. They'se still hiding.

Instead, ask them if they're fine with surveillance cameras in their home that record them jerking off or taking a shit.

Most people wouldn't be happy about that. Most privacy invasions are too subtle and the dangers too abstract to make them care. But almost all agree that cameras in the bathroom is past the line.

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#86
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is little, so yeah deffo time for tech education. My own kids were not particularly interested, but she is, so that's a nice change. Edit: I am gonna start with Faraday Cage. Thanks.

Being the "confused grandparent" might be a fantastic way to teach via the Socratic method. Moreso if one is savvy enough to know what's likely being done (such as remote-admin by the school board), what is rather dystopian and ought to be avoided (see above), and how to work around the blocks put in place by others.

I like the thinking here. Good to draw from.

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if someone then said "I won't tell you of course, but I don't mind if the bank, tax collectors, the police or the govt knows. They already know everything about everyone anyways. I have nothing to hide from them"

Then they're just selective about the hiding and who they trust. They'se still hiding. Instead, ask them if they're fine with surveillance cameras in their home that record them jerking off or taking a shit. Most people wouldn't be happy about that. Most privacy invasions are too subtle and the dangers too abstract to make them care. But almost all agree that cameras in the bathroom is past the line.

In my experience, they agree to the bathroom example, but don't care enough to realize the double standard with the subtler, more insidious privacy invasions. Kinda even agreeing with it, as long as it means lower prices or some other convenience. This is the fight I don't know how to win unfortunately.

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they're just selective about the hiding and who they trust. They'se still hiding. Instead, ask them if they're fine with surveillance cameras in their home that record them jerking off or taking a shit. Most people wouldn't be happy about that. Most privacy invasions are too subtle and the dangers too abstract to make them care. But almost all agree that cameras in the bathroom is past the line.

In my experience, they agree to the bathroom example, but don't care enough to realize the double standard with the subtler, more insidious privacy invasions. Kinda even agreeing with it, as long as it means lower prices or some other convenience. This is the fight I don't know how to win unfortunately.

Yeah, I have no problem with ignorant people losing the game of evolution, but they are dragging me down with them.

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#89
post #9

Why do people (schools) care? What's the goal here? How does tracking everything a student does help them and how can they justify wasting time and money on this?

Schools are tasked with trying to solve all manner of social problems. Kids didn't show up? Blame the school for not dragging them in. Kids cheat? The administrator has to deal with it. Kids are fat? Must be that the school isn't managing their lunches. This is what they have come up with.

And people say young people have no initiative now. Wait until this surveillance system is done with them.

Re: Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense

#90
post #51
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the Chromebooks could dual-boot with regular Linux.

They can but they need to be dis-enrolled in enterprise management, so students cannot do this themselves. At least at the time I looked at it, there was no reasonable workaround.

I heard rumors (friend of a classmate of a friend) that some kid was able to get their older brother to help wipe the boot memory chip or something to get rid of it. Nothing reasonable for non experts that I know of
Post reply on HN