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Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

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Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#31

Post by open-source-ux »

Why is there so little scrutiny over Chromebooks in schools? Every time this topic is raised, people rush to Google's defence. Yes, I know Google doesn't create advertising profiles from student data. This doesn't make their data collection behaviour defensible. They are still capturing student data in staggering quantities.

Even if the data is "anonymous" (a meaningless term) and aggregated in some form, this is still an unimaginably huge quantity of student data that Google have captured and saved for themselves.

Rather than ask what kind of tracking is acceptable, we should instead ask: why is tracking of students (who have no choice in the matter) even considered acceptable in the first place?

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#32

Post by Haydos585x2 »

ourmandave wrote: post #15
Haydos585x2 wrote: post #14

I used to work in school IT and had products pitched to us constantly that would be basically malware/RATs to spy on students. We could purchase anything that would help us look at Facebook messages, emails, documents/picture, anything really. Our department went against it for a few reasons: - If you have this knowledge you need to monitor it. If a student is writing about killing themselves in a document on their m…

Reminds me of a Pennsylvania school "WebcamGate" in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School... The school's IT dept had a program to control the student's laptop camera so if it was lost or stolen they could take a picture and see where it was and with who. It didn't end well.

Yep, you're totally right. Different country and different product but if anyone is unsure what features these tools have available they should read that wikipedia page.

We all knew at some point it would be used inappropriately and we'd all be responsible in some way. I think schools and their departments are right to move away from these types of tools. They're teenage kids, not some domestic terrorist with an enormous network.

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#33

Post by JCharante »

alacombe wrote: post #26
stephengillie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids are human people. Why should some of us have no expectation of privacy, while others do?

I would argue that kids are more proto-human being than fully fledged human being, which is why they need education to start with. Also, why, if they are human being, are they subjected to lesser criminal penalties than "adults" ?

> Also, why, if they are human being, are they subjected to lesser criminal penalties than "adults" ?

Yeah that's something that we really need to fix, although aren't there many cases of minors being charged as adults?

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#34

Post by alacombe »

JCharante wrote: post #33
alacombe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that kids are more proto-human being than fully fledged human being, which is why they need education to start with. Also, why, if they are human being, are they subjected to lesser criminal penalties than "adults" ?

> Also, why, if they are human being, are they subjected to lesser criminal penalties than "adults" ? Yeah that's something that we really need to fix, although aren't there many cases of minors being charged as adults?

Given the unpopularity of my other comments, I don't think trialling children as adults will be popular either.

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#35

Post by gruez »

grzm wrote: post #22
gruez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Vouch for it, as we can see someone has. The system works. Can you even do that? I thought flag/vouch only works for links.

As 'aaron695 said, it works for comments as well. If you want to confirm, turn on showdead and view some comments. You should see a vouch link.

yeah, i see it now. you have to click into a comment before it shows up.
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