How's universities are not yet part of class action lawsuit for gross abuse of privacy, students rights and segregation due to the personal characteristics?
EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
171–180 of 538 posts
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#172Proctorio is on my red flag list. If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.
I'm conflicted about this.
I agree with you that I think working for this company and not having an ethical objection is a red flag.
But the interview environment is fraught. Is it really obvious that no candidate would think "this question is a trap"? There's a lot of interview advice that says your answer to this question can only ever hurt you, so be as bland as possible.
Some employers want compliant employees who don't rock the boat. Some employers will hear complaints about proctorio's software and hear "SJW shit".
I don't want to work for those kinds of employers, but I sympathize with people who want a job and might fear that their honest answer could be used against them.
Ultimately, I think I have to come down on this policy being a bad idea, however understandable.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#173In case you don't know who Proctorio is: (like me) Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you. "Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin color…
It's actually very disappointing that this whole monitoring system was deemed necessary to begin with. How screwed is the system that anyone one would believe this level of intrusion should be part of the education process.
> How screwed is the system that anyone one would believe this level of intrusion should be part of the education process.
It's all a lot of smoke grenades to cover for:
- an education system/process that at its core is not about actual learning but "bulimia learning" aka memorizing the facts the profs deemed relevant for the exam and forgetting them the very second the exam is over to make space for new useless stuff that will be forgotten just the same way.
- an employment system that has "optimized" to needing as-standardized-as-possible papers that certify potential employees of having skill X so that hiring managers can easily separate between candidates that are "worth it" on paper without having to waste time on "unworthy" candidates - something that obviously fails as it chucks out a lot of the people that aren't built for bulimia learning but can't prove that (unlike an awful lot of the "certified" people) they actually know what they're doing
- "education" institutions that are more interested in getting grant money and income from student tuition rather than on training actually talented students
- and as a root cause of all of that: employers believing they need "university graduates" when the good old German-style apprenticeship system works just fine... with the side effect that apprenticeships cost the employer actual money for years for training the apprentice, whereas with university the students and their parents pay the bill for, sometimes, the rest of their lives
Education and employment is in dire need of reforms. Universities should be serving only those who are actually interested in science, companies should pay for educating the workforce they need instead of forcing generations of young people to take on unsustainable debts, and schools should be reformed to actually provide stuff people are going to use in their later career.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#174Proctorio is on my red flag list. If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.
I don't think that's entirely fair to the candidates. I don't know your stance on Proctorio and I'm not going to air dirty laundry to an effective stranger. And any company or hiring manager who tries to bait me into bad-mouthing a company I've worked at gets a red flag from me.
Agreed. An employer could just as easily say they don’t want anyone who bad mouths their previous employers because it reflects poorly on them.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#175Proctorio is on my red flag list. If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.
I don't think that's entirely fair to the candidates. I don't know your stance on Proctorio and I'm not going to air dirty laundry to an effective stranger. And any company or hiring manager who tries to bait me into bad-mouthing a company I've worked at gets a red flag from me.
Sure it is. My first job outta college was for a defense contractor. It's perfectly fair to ask me why I left, or even more pointedly, "how do you feel about working for a defense contractor?"
It's not an invitation to badmouth, it IS an invitation to discuss the ethical concerns involved, and why you found it acceptable (even if it's just that it was a meal ticket until you found something you objected to less)
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. It isn't a minority. It is an overwhelming majority if they think they can get away with it. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_... https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1....
Maybe we should stop endlessly pushing and insisting on degrees... Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such a bad thing. As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done.
I agree, but got mine later in life because not everyone does and I didn't want not being in the club to block some opportunities.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#177Background: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...
The EFF took the student defense and sued back Proctorio yesterday. Good!
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf...
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's entirely fair to the candidates. I don't know your stance on Proctorio and I'm not going to air dirty laundry to an effective stranger. And any company or hiring manager who tries to bait me into bad-mouthing a company I've worked at gets a red flag from me.
Agreed. An employer could just as easily say they don’t want anyone who bad mouths their previous employers because it reflects poorly on them. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Only if the goal is simply "get a job, anywhere". If the interview is to mutually figure out if you should work for the company, there is no such thing as a damned if you do, damned if you don't; all it can be is a "they care about what I care about" or "I don't want to work there".
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#179Proctorio is on my red flag list. If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.
Ah yes, screw those people for... needing to pay the bills.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#180I have a question for anyone who has seen similar situations. (I'm 35+ years old and have never work at a corporation except for some small gigs when I was 18, so I'm really ignorant of how these companies and internal decision making work) Why in the world would a company sue a critic, under weak legal arguments, thus buying themselves this kind of terrible negative publicity? Who will trust/like/or want to be assoc…
A lot of people will likely never have heard of this, and it's not like you or I as a student will have any choice in the matter anyway; it's not like we can choose to not use this software. And universities generally don't care.
They have nothing to lose, except a comparatively small amount of money.
Given that the CEO has previously gone on Reddit to bollock a student complaining and post part of the private support chat log, this may not necessarily be a rational decision. Sometimes just a single vindictive and nasty C-level person can set these things in motion.