US Schools Gave Kids Laptops During The Pandemic. Then They Spied On Them. Digital Surveillance

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Tue Oct 12, 2021, 11:43 PM - Edit history (1)

- The Guardian, Oct. 11, 2021. Jessa Crispin, Opinion. - Edited

According to one survey, 81% of US teachers said their schools monitor devices. Students are not always aware.

When the pandemic started last year, countless forms of inequality were exposed – including the millions of American families who don’t have access to laptops or broadband internet. After some delays, schools across the country jumped into action and distributed technology to allow students to learn remotely. The catch? They ended up spying on students. “For their own good”, of course. According to recent research by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), “86% of teachers reported that, during the pandemic, schools provided tablets, laptops, or Chromebooks to students at twice the rate (43%) prior to the pandemic, an illustration of schools’ attempts to close disparities in digital access.”

The problem is, a lot of those electronics were being used to monitor students, even combing through private chats, emails and documents all in the name of protecting them.

More than 80% of surveyed teachers and 77% of surveyed high school students told the CDT that their schools use surveillance software on those devices, and the more reliant students are on those electronics, unable to afford supplementary phones or tablets, the more they are subjected to scrutiny. “We knew that there were students out there having ideations around suicide, self-harm and those sorts of things,” a school administrator explained to the CDT researchers. .. "We could also do a good job with students who might be thinking about bullying … If I can save one student from committing suicide, I feel like that platform is well worth every dime that we paid for [it].”


- The type of MacBook involved in the Lower Merion School District case (below)


Thousands of school districts across the U.S. have installed surveillance software on school-provided devices to monitor their students’ online interactions. If a student emails or chats with another student saying they’ve been thinking of hurting themselves or that there is trouble at home, an AI bot or a human moderator watching over the messages in real time can send an alert to a teacher or administrator, allowing the teacher to jump in within minutes and ask if everything is OK. Programs such as Bark, Gnosis IQ, Gaggle, and Lightspeed can cost the schools tens of thousands of dollars to implement, and they can be set up to search for language & online behavior indicating the possibility of violent tendencies, suicidal ideation, drug use, pornography use, or eating disorders.

I can certainly understand why schools would jump on technology they think might prevent teen suicide, bullying, & the like. The pandemic has been hard on everyone, particularly hard on kids & teenagers. Students are reporting an increase in self-harm incidents & aggressive impulses since the beginning of lockdowns, & shoving everyone back together for a new school year is going to require adjustments. The only problem is that we’ve tried this before, in a different form. Everyone’s proposed solution to the advent of school shootings was, “Well, let’s just watch these little deviants much more closely.” Metal detectors at school entrances became the norm, police had a more visible presence, & security cameras went up in classrooms & hallways. That was a big business; schools spent billions on security infrastructure that mostly proved to be ineffective. And the results were kids felt unsafe, Black students were followed & harassed most frequently, & punishments increased as educational outcomes worsened.

Some schools have started questioning whether their contracts with the police create more harm than good, others are simply adding digital surveillance...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/11/us-students-digital-surveillance-schools
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- Also: (Wiki) Robbins v. Lower Merion School District is a federal class action lawsuit, brought in February 2010 on behalf of students of two high schools in Lower Merion Township, a suburb of Philadelphia. In October 2010, the school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle the Robbins and parallel Hasan lawsuits against it. The suit alleged that, in what was dubbed the "WebcamGate" scandal, the schools secretly spied on the students while they were in the privacy of their homes. School authorities surreptitiously and remotely activated webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District

[Throck]

1. I suspect workers at home were spied on as well.

[madville]

2. There is no expectation of privacy

On a government or work provided device. It’s always addressed in the user agreement that no one reads. Also think of all the people that have loaded applications onto their personal laptops, tablets and phones and willingly granted access to things like their photo libraries, camera and microphone to use said applications.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. The issue of liability here is, IMO, a pertinent one ...

School gives a 7th grader a computer 'for school'
Looks up how commit suicide on their school computer
Does it

Now ... who's fault is it?

School gives a 7th grader a computer 'for school'
Is approached by a predator online while using their school computer
Meets predator, terrible things happen

Now ... who's fault is it (other than the predator)?

The list of possibilities for creating some complex liability issues ... is long.

[Bluethroughu]

4. Funny thing....

My son turned off his camera on the laptop. He then turned on a multi-color strobe in his room. Then, he watched it blink on the teachers face, so he knew she could see him!

He told me about it, I told him put a piece of tape over the camera. We did notice the computer start on it's own a few times, so we'd say a lot of profanity about people spying on others, including those listening through the computer.

We are all spied on through our phones, 1984 style.