101–110 of 176 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a "safegaurding lead"? It sounds kind of creepy from your description.
It's the UK term for the person in any organisation that deals with vulnerable people (children, patients, disabled people, old people) that has the responsibility of taking any allegations, concerns, accusations and making sure they are dealt with properly. That means documenting, investigating, and escalating to the authorities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many tragedies happen daily because of human imperfections and limitations. If we develop and put a monitoring collar on the neck of every human being from the day they wre born, we could save so many of them. How far are you willing to go?
I dont think anyones advocating going that far edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between the two ludicrous extremes of 'everyone just look out for themselves' and 'collars that monitor every moment of their lives' based on general consensus arrived at via public discussion and democracy.
Not yet.
> edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between the two ludicrous extremes
That sensible conclusion is "you can't save everyone". If you try, you inevitably become the tyrant we must be saved from.
To save everyone, you require omniscience and omnipotence. You must know everything about your subjects and have the power to act on that knowledge. There's not a single human on this Earth I would trust with that power.
The title made it sound like the schools were installing malware on students' devices, but as far as I can tell this is just a central database bringing together data from different government agencies. I'm not sure I see the problem with schools getting an update that a kid was arrested by police or that their family is on food aid or something. Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in poverty becaus…
I am not sure any of that is any of a schools business. Not even sure something like that would be legal over here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, child predators are likely to get themselves into as strong a position of trust as possible - coaches, church leaders etc, so I would expect them to attempt to become a safeguarding lead. They could then also use the data to explain why they were taking certain kids into one-on-one sessions.
I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me regardless here! Senior leaders at schools don't need "data" to justify talking one on one to students or to figure out which students seem vulnerable. On the other hand, data is useful for people with actual welfare concerns about a child in establishing if there might be some underlying reason behind the child's…
I very much enjoyed my time at an ordinary human child school and attended the mandatory educational lessons very promptly.
There's a balance between using data to identify problems and collecting data which is open to abuse. What concerns me is the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers who are typically not the most privacy focussed people. The predatory teacher example is an outlier, but it demonstrates how there can be unintended consequences. What's more likely is that there will be unconscious bias by the teachers against the disadvantaged children from poorer backgrounds.
To my mind, teachers should only function as a backup social service for those kids that slip through the net (admittedly, not a good net) and should be focussed primarily on education. What set my alarm bells ringing is the lack of openness about the database and whether families can correct false records (assuming they even know that the data exists).
Lots of people here not really understanding how this works in the UK. A few times there's been a big media stories in the UK about a child who got badly abused or killed in domestic situations and then afterwards it turns out that various people (social services, teachers, charities etc) had concerns about the child's safety but concerns weren't written down or joined together and so the child could have been saved/…
If you're going to hold government services such as social services or teachers responsible for childrens safety then this sort of thing is needed. And if you think thats not the job of the state then fair enough thats your opinion but in the UK the status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after vulnerable children/people. This is the heart of the problem. When you start trying to turn people like teache…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the kind of thing where it might be ask for a panopticon where the parents can see precisely what kind of queries are run on their data, by whom and why, with a time limited ability to keep query data secret for police investigations and such. Fighting against this type of data sharing on principle will probably fail because there are some legitimate use cases to Keep the Children Safe for this type of data.…
I'm curious how well a GDPR challenge would fare. There's specific exemptions around data gathering to detect fraud and to solve crimes, but this database has a lot more detail and the lack of consent from families is concerning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the UK term for the person in any organisation that deals with vulnerable people (children, patients, disabled people, old people) that has the responsibility of taking any allegations, concerns, accusations and making sure they are dealt with properly. That means documenting, investigating, and escalating to the authorities.
Somewhat similar to ombudsman?
The Brits have gone all in on the surveillance society with their CCTV cameras all over the place and now the Online Safety Bill. Still early days, I'm sure it'll be expanded at every opportunity. Maybe 1984 is the blueprint. In the US the fundamental Christians are grabbing power and they're taking flamethrowers to books and talking about tracking women who may go across state-lines to get an abortion. Self-censorsh…
It's not just the British. For decades in the US, school administrators have been obsessed with monitoring student's online activity and email. There is a lucrative industry providing what amounts to glue and regexs for detecting and reporting suicidal language, threats of violence, and so on (you can be sure there's detection of LGBTQ language for all the various religious schools.) There is a subreddit for K-12 IT…
Otherwise the advice should be, as you said, to never use a school device for anything not explicitly required by the school. But when there’s no other route, surveilled access is better than none, I guess?
It’s a tough quandary though - schools can be held liable, at least socially so if not legally, if kids use school provided devices for all the things kids use devices for that they shouldn’t. Meeting sexual predators, bullying, etc. Many parents are technically incapable of monitoring their online activity, others too busy. Schools are being put in a weird spot of being access providers to an adult world online, not just educators.
I’ll wager a lot of school surveillance started with parents demanding it.
It’s a tough subject, I don’t have the answer. My intuition tells me schools shouldn’t be involved in access OR monitoring, but I also understand the “digital divide” isn’t just a media term. A lot of pretty smart kids live in a pretty neglected context, and without access to sources of fact like Wikipedia or sources of dubious plagiarism like ChatGPT (tongue in cheek), they’re at a structural disadvantage that can’t be overcome through hard work alone.
Can we also have a discussion about the 'normal' behaviour monitoring tools like Classcharts that are used by pretty much every school in the UK? These collect fine-grained data about behaviour throughout the day and link it both to the child but also the people that are near that child. It operates all across the child's school career. I've tried to opt my kids out of this but it's really hard. At best I think they…
How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just a central database bringing together data from different government agencies I realize this is a US perspective, but this actually sets off more alarm bells in my head than a school overreaching by installing spyware. The latter can be addressed by direct parental action pretty easily. Government agencies systematically sharing data is a lot harder to solve and if anything is more dangerous. Just because a fam…
I'm sympathetic to this, because my own politics are very libertarian. But recently I've gotten more sensitive to cases where we acknowledge that something is the government's job (e.g. protecting kids from violence), but then we insist that that job should be done poorly . I think this has ripple effects, not only in that the job doesn't get done well, but in the culture of how the government works and who chooses t…