Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State • Hacker News Board

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#131

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #29

magduf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>however, i do worry about fights and bullying being taken to 'the dark corners of the school' such as the bathroom or some unused stairwell 1) They did that a lot back in the "old days" anyway, since it was away from other people 2) bullies usually have poor impulse control and don't think immediately about the consequences of their actions, so they frequently won't think about the cameras, so at least some of the t…

#2 sounds like natural selection that'll result in more effective bullies.

Outside of school "bullying" is a kind of crime. Either assault, battery or mugging. For some reason juveniles get the epithet instead of the real thing, as if it is less grave or something...

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#132

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

DocTomoe wrote: post #34

panzagl wrote: post #3

Since I can't read the article I can only go with story time here- my wife has cameras in her room and she loves them. Fights about 'who started it' are ended with the words, 'Ok, let's look at the video'. And when some little bully gets called on the carpet and their bullying parent comes in all set to steamroller administration with 'that's not what my child said happened why are you picking on them' the principal…

> my wife has cameras in her room and she loves them. Police also loves more surveillance. The push against surveillance tries not to help the (maybe benevolent) oppressor, but the (potential) oppressed.

Chilling effects exist, plus the potential for abuse. (And not by the policeman, but whoever gives him orders most likely.)

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#133

Post by rayiner » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #109

rayiner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we had these as kids. The number one problem with education in the US is the lack of discipline in the class room. Teachers spend all their time babysitting problem children instead of helping everyone else learn. Parents of problem kids do everything they can to push their children’s behavioral issues back on the teachers. Cameras in the classroom could go a long way to helping schools build record evidence t…

>The number one problem with education in the US is the lack of discipline in the class room. Surely lack of adequate funding, crumbling infrastructure, out-of-date textbooks or lack of textbooks, bad curricula, a highly regimented and normative model of education (with "normal" kids and "problem" kids) and many other things could be judged to be more significant issues than "lack of discipline", which might be slapp…

US schools are very well funded. Adjusted for purchasing power, US educational spending is up there with Switzerland and Norway as the highest in the OECD for primary and secondary education, and is the highest for tertiary: https://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng....

Primary school aged children have plenty of executive function. We’re not talking about daycares for toddlers. Americans just have very low expectations for discipline. Have you ever seen the inside of a classroom in Asia?

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#134

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

behringer wrote: post #107

skybrian wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is abstraction. How do you apply that to the case of a teacher sending misbehaving kids to the principal's office, and what would you want instead?

We've never required surveillance to send kids to the office before...

Having a teacher in the room has the same "you're being watched" effect as a camera, it's just less efficient at watching.

I want to highlight the tension between liberty & socialization here, because I think it's getting glossed over. Public education is a huge infringement on individual liberty - it's basically mandatory brainwashing of kids for 6-8 hours/day, 180 days/year, for 12 years. Nobody would realistically suggest getting rid of it, because we all grew up with it.

Taking it back a step, parenting is also an infringement on individual liberty - a child is totally dependent upon a parent, and oftentimes exposed to nothing other than the parent's views, and is biologically hard-wired to pick up on a parent's emotions and mirror them. Can't really blame society for that, though, evolution did it.

People who worry about the slippery slope are right to worry. But it's been going on for centuries. We think that our particular point on it is natural and right because that's what we grew up with, just as our kids might think pervasive surveillance is natural and right because that's what they grew up with - which is exactly what we're justifiably afraid of. If we lived on individual farming homesteads and someone proposed taking our kids away from us for the majority of their waking childhood, we'd probably be even more upset.

Probably the endgame is like the Matrix, where humans are confined to individual pods with no agency of their own, except that instead of being tapped for bio-energy we'll end up being used to train machine-learning algorithms.

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#135

Post by Rainymood » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

moorhosj wrote: post #9

artificial wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not examine it from another perspective? Risk and reward? Are more people served by it or harmed? For example look at how useful dashcams and bodycams are to situations! Oh and an anecdote! I was parking at work and the building security cameras witnessed the collision (driver was on their phone and tboned me) making the insurance claim open and shut. We have security camera inside as well with displays throughou…

I think the point is that once the cat is out of the bag it’s hard to put it back. For example, at first more people were helped by opiates than harmed. As time passed, by the time we realized that relationship had changed, we already had a bunch of addicted citizens. It isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine an authoritarian government using our own surveillance video for nefarious purposes.

I don't want to use the word "literally" too much but ... China is literally doing this.

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#136

Post by cj » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #123

cj wrote: post #10

The paywalls on all major news sites are driving me crazy. Not because they cost money (I am willing to pay), but because it's not practical to buy an online subscription to 10+ major news sites individually. Is there a service that lets you pay 1 monthly fee for a subscription to the top 10 major (paywalled) news sites?

I know it's annoying, but please don't take HN threads on this off-topic tangent. The situation sucks, but we all know how it sucks, all these discussions are the same, and the rule here has been settled for years: if there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.c…

> Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

Yea.. the purpose of this comment was to ask if there's a way to pay for these paywalls to permanently bypass them.

And there were some useful replies: I haven't looked into Apple News Plus before. Thanks for the reply, jbigelow76 and runwerks

And sorry Daniel. I guess I should have posted an Ask HN instead.

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#137

Post by SamuelAdams » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

LocalH wrote: post #2

It's interesting the parallels that can be drawn to tobacco addiction , of all things. Hook 'em while they're young, and they won't think anything about expanding the surveillance when they're in power, because it's what they're used to, so why not if it can protect people?

Reminds me of this answer: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/33471

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#138

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #19

panzagl wrote: post #3

Since I can't read the article I can only go with story time here- my wife has cameras in her room and she loves them. Fights about 'who started it' are ended with the words, 'Ok, let's look at the video'. And when some little bully gets called on the carpet and their bullying parent comes in all set to steamroller administration with 'that's not what my child said happened why are you picking on them' the principal…

Nope. Not worth it. There are mountains of evidence demonstrating that people change their behaviors when they know they are being watched. Do we really care about the automatic resolution of petty squabbles between children, or even the coercion of children to never engage in petty squabbles? Do we really want to rob children of mischief, conflict resolution, and making a case for themselves in a way that cannot alw…

> There are mountains of evidence demonstrating that people change their behaviors when they know they are being watched.

Religion is a heck of a thing

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#139

Post by skybrian » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #134

behringer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've never required surveillance to send kids to the office before...

Having a teacher in the room has the same "you're being watched" effect as a camera, it's just less efficient at watching. I want to highlight the tension between liberty & socialization here, because I think it's getting glossed over. Public education is a huge infringement on individual liberty - it's basically mandatory brainwashing of kids for 6-8 hours/day, 180 days/year, for 12 years. Nobody would realistically…

Your analysis has an underlying assumption of individualism. That is, the ideology (quite common in the U.S.) that each person is competent to make their own decisions and has the right to do so independently of what anyone else might want.

Having kids or taking care of mentally declining parents tends to put a big dent in that. Or working in other situations where you commonly interact with people who are clearly no good on their own. However much lip service we might pay to it, respect for Autonomy and Individual Agency only goes so far when people are doing what's Clearly The Wrong Thing, then you have to decide when to step in.

Group decision-making is messier but in many ways more realistic. It isn't necessarily dystopian, though someone thinking in purely individualistic terms might see at as such.

Re: Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State

#140

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #131

ceejayoz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 sounds like natural selection that'll result in more effective bullies.

Outside of school "bullying" is a kind of crime. Either assault, battery or mugging. For some reason juveniles get the epithet instead of the real thing, as if it is less grave or something...

Not all bullying is physical, and the "school to prison pipeline" approach has its own major issues.