Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the U.S. don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts.
“As we demonstrated with our own Red Flag Machine, however, this software flags and blocks websites for spurious reasons and often disproportionately targets disadvantaged, minority and LGBTQ youth,” the Electronic Software Foundation (EFF) says.
The companies making the software claim it’s all done for the sake of student safety: preventing self-harm, suicide, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. While a noble goal, given that suicide is the second highest cause of death among American youth 10-14 years old, no comprehensive or independent studies have shown an increase in student safety linked to the usage of this software. Quite to the contrary: a recent comprehensive RAND research study shows that such AI monitoring software may cause more harm than good.
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I suspect the real reason they are doing this is to condition the students to accept oppressive and unjust surveillance in future workplaces.
Just as securicams in schools in the 90’s conditioned a lot of people to accept on-street surveillance.
Yeah, that’ll be misused. Without a doubt.
What an awful development.
Don’t put personal shit on work devices. This is pretty basic.
Kids going to school cannot reasonably be expected to have the knowledge, forethought, or ability to protect themselves from privacy violations. They lack the rights, info and social power to meaningfully do anything about this. That’s why it’s exploitative and harmful. Edit: that’s also to say nothing of the chilling effect this is going to have on kids who DO need to talk about something but now feel they have to hide it, or feel ashamed of it. Shit is bad news all around.
Sooo schools should just provide devices to kids with no monitoring at all?
There shouldn’t be an expectation of privacy on school/company provided devices, that isn’t how it works literally anywhere. It’s on the parents to teach their children not to use the device for personal reasons.
Ideally the school machines should be limited to only allowing coursework and limited messaging between classmates and teachers, it’s a tool not a toy.
Idk I just can’t get upset about this. Kids and privacy is kind of a tough one to begin with, I personally think kids shouldn’t have unregulated access to communication devices at all until like 14-15, maybe.
Yes. There are tons of enterprise tools to lock devices to certain activities. Surveillance is not necessary and will be used to violate privacy, and I am not talking about just on device communication. Remember when companies were caught using their employees cameras without any indication on the device? The suspected benefits of surveillance is not worth the potential harm.
My company exclusively deploys machines with physical coverings for the camera and hardware disconnects for the mics.
Good! Not all companies do that and I highly doubt school districts in most places will. They tend to be underfunded and understaffed
