It's funny how every society has its own way of mistreating children, yet never considers it a problem at the time. We look at the ways children were harmed and exploited throughout history and shake our heads at how our morally underdeveloped forebears could be so cruel and misguided. Then we turn around and declare that our children have no right whatsoever to privacy, and that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good".
I firmly believe that a hundred years, people will look back on practices like this and shake their heads at the appalling attitudes their primitive ancestors had towards children. But I imagine that's little comfort to the kids subject to this kind of abuse.
I strongly agree with your entire comment. That said, I think this:
> that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good"
Are actually two separate problems with our society.
Problem 1: denying privacy to children, various forms of helicopter parenting. This you've covered, and I agree this is our era's way of mistreating children.
Problem 2: "by team of strangers". as a Service. This is a much broader topic to cover it all here, but constrained to the context of data processing and children - social-wide, we're too eager to entrust sensitive matters to random strangers, giving them too much leeway, as if they weren't incentivized to abuse it in every way they can get away with.
People are having ridiculously inconsistent "trust functions" here. You wouldn't give this level of access to a small shop from your neighborhood that offered you a service, but you give it to a random tech startup from far away, just because the guy looks kind of creepy and the startup has a shiny web page. Even though a realistic threat model would suggest the former can be trusted way more than the latter (less incentives and less capability to screw you over, and they live near you). It's like most people can't internalize the lesson, even though they're being repeatedly screwed over by almost every business they interact with.
What pisses me off more, is when it's the other party that inserts some third parties into the process. When you have a kid attending a school, there's a degree of trust and responsibility shared between you and the school. But then the school outsources data management or remote learning to some random vendors, vendors who absolutely cannot be trusted. And as a parent, you can't do much about it.
One day in the future people will look back at our times and think about all of us and most of the market the way we today think about literal snake oil salesmen and people duped by them.
> What pisses me off more, is when it's the other party that inserts some third parties into the process. When you have a kid attending a school, there's a degree of trust and responsibility shared between you and the school. But then the school outsources data management or remote learning to some random vendors, vendors who absolutely cannot be trusted. And as a parent, you can't do much about it.
I don't understand why the parents are letting the school into their kids heads while they're at home to begin with. School administrators shouldn't be parenting (and we should ask ourselves why this seems reasonable for them to explicitly assume parenting roles over all the kids), and they should probably be more concerned about what kinds of porn their teachers are watching. They should never, ever be concerned with the question of which kids are watching which porn unless it somehow literally cannot be avoided because the kid drags it explicitly into the classroom.
"If so, this is no different than your employer actively monitoring your activity on their devices"
When I was 12, I didn't sign an employment contract with my school and they didn't pay me. Have times changed so much? Why would you imply that two relationships are in any way comparable?
Owning a device does not grant you a right to violate people's privacy - if you lease a car, is it okay for the rental company to install cameras in it and record you having sex in it?
Surely you understand why a school-owned and school-provided device is monitored by the school, and why this scenario is not directly comparable to a car lease (with a lease being quite a different contract, with different goals and legal mechanisms)?
Whether or not you are being paid is irrelevant - the key part is that some other entity is providing hardware that they own and allowing you to use it under certain conditions. Those conditions are: use it for the purposes agreed upon, and the device will be monitored to ensure it is being used for only the purposes agreed upon.
I certainly don't think we're doing our kids any favors with the constant and forced surveillance 24/7. But I can understand why an organization wants to keep their hardware managed.
Not at all, I do not see how a school's interest in monitoring a measly $300 chromebook outweighs a child's privacy. Meanwhile sportscars are used to break the actuall law, not T&C, daily, and occasionally kills people, yet company's interest in monitoring their $150,000 vehicle doesn't seem to matter.
The only difference here is that kids are powerless, unlike customers renting sportscars for $$.
I'm having a really hard time following the thought process here.
For one, I already said I agree that children's privacy shouldn't be invaded - that's not the point. The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Secondly, you first talked about a lease and now you seem to be talking about cars in general? But also companies which issue $150,000 sports cars? (Which company provides $150,000 sports cars, by the way? So I can apply.)
For what it's worth, every corporate fleet vehicle I've had the pleasure of using has been strictly monitored by the company who owns it - just like they monitor the other hardware that they own and lend me.
And if you're not talking about corporate owned vehicles - we're back to square one. Leases are different contracts with different expectations than loaned devices.
> The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Why should that right win out in this case over the user's right to fiduciary technology that puts their interests first?
A company car can be worn out by driving it around for frivolous reasons, so the company will impose a condition that you can't do that, and monitor you to make sure you obey the restriction you agreed to.
A school issued laptop is not going to wear out any faster or slower depending on what you type on it. And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
The school might have a legitimate interest in whether the students are leaving their laptops plugged in all night mining Bitcoins and wearing out the battery. They don't have any legitimate interest in the contents of the students' diaries, whether they're written using school-issued tools or not.
Teaching students to expect this sort of treatment from people with power over them is corrosive to society.
> And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
Are you sure about that? I'm not allowed to use my employer's laptop for personal use. Why am I allowed to use the school's laptop for personal use?
> That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy
You like to talk about rights. Doesn't the school have the right to say, "You can't use this device unless you comply with the (arbitrary) rules that I make. One of those rules is that I'm going to spy on your use of this device. If you do not like it, you are free to use your own device instead."
Sorry, there may be a restriction against personal use; this system is not being used to enforce a restriction against personal use, as described in the article. It's being used to monitor all use, personal or otherwise, for content the school is interested in, no matter in what context it is written. It's not scanning for non-school documents in general, or video games.
The school has a right to impose conditions or monitor, to the same extent that anyone lending someone something has that right. But in this case it is in conflict with the child's rights, in a few ways:
1. The child may not know about the monitoring.
2. The child, being a child, may not actually have a feasible way to use their "own" device. The school-issued device may be the only device they have access to or that they or their family can afford.
3. The school may expect or require them to use the school-issued device in certain situations, and may not appreciate it when the child troops into class with their own personal machine, or tries to take a test from home on an ordinary PC.
4. The child has a right to a good education from the school, to make them into an adult that one is happy to share a society with. A good education should teach a person not to tolerate arbitrary restrictions, conditions, or monitoring without good cause, especially from a governmental agency.
Finally, I believe users of computing devices have the right to be able to rely on those devices as extensions of themselves. Having somebody else all up in your computing experience is a lot like having somebody else inside your head, and in general it shouldn't be allowed.
Sorry, what I meant to say here I think is that Gaggle isn't being used to enforce a restriction against personal use. It seems like the school district in the article doesn't particularly care whether students are using their laptops or school accounts for personal use or not. They're not surveilling Google chat and e-mail looking for just any personal communications, or excluding academic communications form surveillance.
Look at the "what Gaggle flagged on kids' computers" chart: none of this is "video games" or "wasting time on YouTube" or "visiting sketchy domains that might host ransomware". If that sort of stuff was in "Other", "Other" would be the biggest category. If personal use of the devices or accounts outside the particular areas Gaggle scans for is against policy, the school doesn't seem to be using this tool to try and enforce that policy.
They are instead using the tool to examine everything the students do or store that might be related to these topics, whether it happens during personal or academic use.
> The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Or we should aggressively throw that idea out and take privacy rights to take precedence over corporate ownership of property. If the organization isn't willing to trust you with that device without constantly monitoring you, they shouldn't "lend" it to you (since "lending" in this context is always coercive and its mandated by your employer as well and you cannot effectively opt-out).
I believe I already agreed that surveillance culture isn't doing our kids any favors. Not sure why you are trying to convince me on that, despite me saying it in my first post.
You keep arguing from the perspective that the school/company necessarily has the "right" to spy on anyone using its loaned equipment.
I thoroughly reject that right as being valid. It should never have been invented as a concept, and you should not be defending that supposed "right".
If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them, and I expect the article to be returned to me in good condition.
And you keep arguing that "surely you understand that they must have right" which is exactly what I'm rejecting, and its very frustrating that you can't even seem to comprehend that someone would strenuously object to your premise to begin with. You just keep on restating that I MUST agree with you that they have that right as a premise to the argument. I reject the premise. If we can't get past that there's no point to this any more, we can't even have an argument about the beneficial effects of rejecting that premise and the horrible effects that keep getting worse and worse of being brainwashed into accepting those "rights" like they're physical laws and not something that we can choose to change.
And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed to accept things that never should have been accepted.
>You keep arguing from the perspective that the school/company necessarily has [...]
Because I am able to separate what is reality and what my ideal is. My ideal aligns closely with yours. But I try not to let it cloud what the reality is; mainly that organizations which provide assets for free to employees/students are allowed to stipulate conditions of use, one of which may be monitoring.
>If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them
You are absolutely allowed to give a laptop to a friend and say "By the way, this has a keylogger on it. If you want to use it, just know that keystrokes are being recorded". You, as the owner of that device, have every right to do that. The key being that you notified the other party (like, for example, terms and conditions of use). Trust doesn't even come into the equation. Would that make you a shitty friend? Yes. Can you still do it? Yes.
>And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed
Jesus that escalated quickly. I am saying that organizations are allowed to have terms of use on their equipment, one of those terms being that the device is monitored, and suddenly I'm the cause of the surveillance state.
"mainly that organizations which provide assets for free to employees/students are allowed to stipulate conditions of use"
1. They are not 'free', they are paid for with taxes
2. stop equating employees and children, it's daft, any judge would throw out such argument without a second thought
3. there are currently like 30 active lawsuits against schools and states for spying. The case law is not set on this matter, it's a new phenomenon and now is the chacne to set the recond strain.
4. Just because you put 'your house now belongs to me' or 'you are now my slave' into terms and condition doesn't make it legally valid.
Indeed it did and it reminds me of a lot of conversations I’ve seen on Twitter with unreasonable people who hold the entire world to their personal ideals, everything else be damned.
"Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use."
That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy. You can demand compensation for damage, but you can't control their life.
If it did exist, it would lead to dystopia. A microcontroller with Wi-fi cost like $0.5, in the next 10 years they will be in library books, pens, shoes, do you want to live in a future where literally everyone can spy on you and fine you every time you let wind because it's against term 527 in T&C?
>That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy.
Who says you have a right to privacy on a device you do not own, provided to you by another organization for a specific use case (school-related learning) and which comes with terms and conditions of use (which, more than likely, includes a monitoring clause)?
Hate to break it to you, but schools and organizations have rights too. One of those being "if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property.".
"Who says you have a right to privacy on a device you do not own"
The law does. You paid for the device, or a car or a house you are renting. For the duration on your possesion the owner does not get to randomly violate your rights. If they are not happy with it, they should not have given you the device.
"if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property."
While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house, and a waiver in case it ends up being child porn .
Also give them a waiver in case they record a conversation with your lawyer, doctor or employer, breaking attorney-client privilidge, medical privilidge or sensitive conversation with your employer.
>The law does. You paid for the device, or a car or a house you are renting.
You aren't renting a car. You are being provided a laptop, owned by someone else, and allowed to use it subject to the fact that you follow their terms and conditions, which happens to include monitoring. Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving.
>While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house,
If you wanna make sex tapes on company or school provided laptops... By all means, go for it. But I have no idea what it has to do with this conversation
"You aren't renting a car. You are being provided a laptop, owned by someone else"
You are being provided a vehicle, owned by someone else. There is no difference, neither is an act of charity
You dont have to use a car, but your kid has to be at school, and has to use their laptop, so you don't have a choice to reject the 'terms and conditions'.
Is you kid's privacy worth less than $300 laptop?
"Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving."
American Civil Liberties Union director Vic Walczak said that “the school district's clandestine electronic eavesdropping violates constitutional privacy rights, intrudes on parents' right to raise their children and may even be criminal under state and federal wiretapping laws.”
You’re living in some kind of world very different than mine. See “Acceptable Use Policies”, which are standard practice for equipment owned by large organizations lent to their employees, staff, and students. Even universities have these policies for loaned equipment.
> Surely you understand why a school-owned and school-provided device is monitored by the school
Not at all, no. Ownership of the device (worth very little, maybe I'd feel different if it was a $100+K instrument on loan) should morally grant no spying rights whatsoever to the owner.
Privacy of the person, but particularly a child, far outweighs the importance of any cheap gadget.
The fact that we think that either of those are okay is wrong.
The fact that you're sitting there wondering how I could possibly object to something so normal and obviously correct is precisely the entire fucking problem.
None of these invasions of privacy should be allowed or considered normal.
I value the privacy of my children and have trusted them with their devices for the most part. I avoided parental controls and blocking applications, I don't monitor them or know their passwords
But once my oldest (9) started disappearing with his iPad for too often and too long, I did browse his YouTube history (I had to ask him to unlock his iPad, as I don't have or know the passcode). And after that I blocked YouTube, as there was just too much adult content for a nine year old. I have also made it a rule that computing and screen time needs to happen in family areas
I still feel like I violated his trust. But I also feel like I can't responsibly allow him to have access to YouTube or the full Internet without experiencing negative effects to his emotional development. I am unsure if I am a helicopter parent in this situation, and if I went too far
ah, your parents probably didn't let you rent whatever you wanted from Blockbuster or buy porno magazines at the convenience store, seems like it's basically the same thing
> And after that I blocked YouTube, as there was just too much adult content for a nine year old.
Did the same for my 6 year old. Yes, there is a lot of stuff I dont want my kid watching.
He used to watch video game videos, mainly by other kids, so I didnt mind.
Then one day, I heard him swearing. Looks like some (a lot?) of these kids swear, even in games like minecraft. And they use sexist language; again, these are videos by kids, some just a few years older than my son.
And now Youtube is banned.
I dont understand where this "helicopter" parent thing comes from. Like another commenter says, will you let you kids eat anything they want? Watch TV till 11 in the night?
I'm curious what do you mean by "adult content" on YouTube? Like sexually explicit or suggestive things, music videos, etc, or rather some other too mature topics?
There are a lot of sexually explicit videos on YouTube. I didn't realise and it was totally my fault for not looking into it as soon as YouTube usage started going up
Or steal your parent's credit card. Its an American company after all they use their CC for everything and a CC is completely normal for identification for some ungodly reason that I do not comprehend.
Just to resgister an account? Is this a new change? It's the first I hear of it, and I have family members with GMail accounts who were <18 only few years ago.
Not to register an account, but any video flagged as any kind of explicit, suggestive or problematic content requires age verification. There was some flack recently as YouTube was requiring age verification for LGBT+ support videos.
For what it is worth, I have a son a little younger than yours and have decided I will do the same.
My reasoning is that these platforms (as we've recently seen) know full well that they cause harm. That gets verified pretty regularly by independent researchers. Standing by and letting a preteen deal with that on their own has predictable enough results: my job is to Sherpa kiddo through life and part of that involves deploying myself as a kind of surrogate sense of self regulation when his fails. I'm pretty liberal and allow privacy on most things (I would never read a diary etc) but draw a line between what he consumes and produces. Privacy is for production, at the moment. Private consumption can come later.
I think it's kind of a reverse anthromorphization, where you don't really think about the specific thing that's happening (some random person getting access to your kids private communication), but think of it as just some abstract thing
Alas not enough people are "pissed off". Societies, in particular the US, are now taking unprecedented risks, dissolving long-standing practices, trampling on moral standards, pursuing massive violations of trust, all in the name of profit making (that - in the scheme of things - is actually quite puny).
Now, it is clear that the diffusion of digital technology invariably takes us to different pastures. We are not in Kansas anymore when everybody carries a connected supercomputer. Both parenting and education will be impacted and will never be the same again. A new equilibrium must be found. But what is happening in the past decade or so is just an unwarranted wild west that capitalizes (literally) on ignorance, inertia, confusion, regulatory capture and political dysfunction.
> the former can be trusted way more than the latter (less incentives and less capability to screw you over, and they live near you).
How is this remotely true? The stranger, after you stop paying them for the service, might spread lies about you, treat your child badly, show your child things you wouldn’t want (guns, drugs, movies, etc). The faceless corporation directly profits off the information it gains, but you can be sure the access control and security measures taken by them mean it’ll never be used to oust something embarrassing about you to your community. Only a dozen or so engineers at Google have direct database access and all of that access is logged and audited.
"you can be sure the access control and security measures taken by them"
How could you possible write this, did you live under a rock for the past 10 years?
Big Co's have literally extorted people and leaked their sex tapes, Vigilante placed bounties on people's heads, Equifax left national databases unsecured, phone operstors have sold realtime location to the highest bigger and left the website to access it unsecured, the list goes on an on. Unbelievable!
I agree with you. I'm not sure I see the direct link between privacy and freedom.
I can be free to do what ever I like, with a complete lack of privacy. Inversely I can lose all my freedom but have relative privacy (i.e solitary confinement). It seems more, repercussion curtails freedom, not privacy. (Perhaps a pointless distinction).
No privacy means you need to consider what you do in light of who might judge you for it.
That very strongly stifles dissent, just because people self-censor out of fear.
Imagine the principal was a bit of a bully, and students knew he could sometimes read their chat messages. They would probably be a lot less likely to talk with each other, or even with their parents, about the bad behavior of the principal. To my mind, this would make the students less free.
Yes, It was probably a silly distinction. But I think trust is what leads to freedom, and privacy is used to reduce the need for trust. But there are other ways to build strong trust (or trust-less) networks.
"I'm not sure I see the direct link between privacy and freedom."
Have you seen "never talk to the police" video, explaining that not even congress know how many different crimes/laws are on the books?
Explaining how easy it is to charge a random person with a crime and get a conviction based on just ill reflection of their character?
Can you draw the logical connection between lack of privacy and how easy it makes it to charge random people arbitrarily? How this could be used for political gain, profit or to supress dissent?
But you are merging issues. The US having complicated sets of laws isn't really an argument for/against privacy... it's an argument for reform.
I can definitely see how a lack of privacy can be used against you. But I'm just saying it's correlative or causative. i.e you can be fairly transparent with a group, and still be relatively free with that group. The privacy isn't what leads to that freedom, it is trust.
At the government level, that is possibly non-existent. But I think it's important to remember that it's trust (or not needing trust) that is the driver of freedom, not other factors.
In principle your arguments are reasonable, but i don't think they are achievable.
Trust is cool, but it's a system designed for friends and family. Can you trust 300 million people with you internet banking password? It's statistically inevitable that some or them are dumb, evil, crazy, or all of the above.
"isn't really an argument for/against privacy... it's an argument for reform."
I don't think its possible to reduce laws to such an extent, lawyers can't know all the laws in the same way developers can't know all the code, and you can't fit all the code of a modern computer into something manageable. Every country I know of is in a similar situation.
Basically thats why we have warrants for search, right to silence and make dragnets illegal.
Also world without privacy is a world where anyone can impersonate you and commit fraud, and anyone can sue you, and even if they loose, financially ruin you.
I agree on all fronts. I don't think we should aim for zero privacy... and you are right it could be a dystopia existence.
But there is a balance where if we view trust as the key, and privacy as the ability to control trust. Then we can come up with solutions that may compromise privacy to some degree but maintain trust. (I don't know what they are, I'm speaking in the rather useless abstract).
More we might miss some good solutions if we are blindly protecting privacy (which is the natural knee jerk I end up with)
Correct is: privacy as a concept already existed in the Ancient era. It is one of the younger human rights, it gained wide-spread adoption in society/culture and accompanying recognition in law about 200 to 100 years ago.
If you define privacy as to be "when watched", then, sure, we've never had privacy. But that I don't think that definition is accepted by many, and it'll lead to an unproductive discussion.
The expectation of privacy has always been when traditionally not under the eyes of others. We've always had this in villages where kids sneak away from supervision.
What we're talking about now is different. It's non-privacy without community. Humans function properly in small tribal groups. If the person invading your privacy is a faceless bureaucrat, then you're much more likely to be misjudged. That's the problem.
> Humans function properly in small tribal groups. If the person invading your privacy is a faceless bureaucrat, then you're much more likely to be misjudged. That's the problem.
Small closed groups feature bullying or enable serious abusers fairly often. Misjudging kids or mistreating them, domestic violence, guys beating weaker guys were just fact of life in villages.
I trust the more important problem is education of kids, kids will not always grow and become a virtuous guy. they need help and teach, but now parents even argue to teacher for let their do not need to write homework...
This has nothing to do with the rights of children. This is about the school system as an ever present overbearing parent in place of the Childs real parents.
Children do not have the right to privacy they are not adults.
I disagree, emphatically. Privacy _is_ a human right; nobody has the right, privilege, or ability to intrude and exfiltrate data from my mind. Computers are nothing less and nothing more than an amplification system for the mind. It ought to share the same privileged status as our deepest, innermost thoughts.
My biggest concern regards the balance between privacy and monitoring is that children nowadays (and even adults) are highly enabled to commit social bullying. Nothing is really disciplining them properly, causing recurring “bowling for Columbine” events we see almost bi-monthly.
It doesn’t help that foreign states are probably working to purposely inhibit or even disable American society as a community function. (See news about Russian state companies and Facebook manipulation from more recent news)
Privacy is important, but public safety has a higher priority.
The biggest risk is abuse of the data, not the basic mission of these monitoring services
Yes, the biggest risk is abuse of the data- but the basic mission of monitoring is also an unacceptable risk. To me, this is similar to the notion: "Yeah, we're building a nitrous fertilizer bomb in the shed, but the _real risk_ is if our neighbor tosses a smoldering cigarette butt into the yard. The grass could catch fire!"
I also respectfully disagree. I'm a sincere egoist, so I say that: no, public safety is not a "higher priority" than _my_ rights, nor is it of a higher priority than any individuals' rights.
I think the solution to bullying, and generally the unwelcome encroachment of others into our spaces, is some ability to rebuke the interlocutors' access to our space entirely, permanently, and even prematurely. You'll notice that the goal of surveillance is antithetical to this, entirely; I take it to mean that the possibility of bullying is endemic to surveillance. You can not have surevillance without the opportunity for gross abuses.
Don't get me wrong, I do care for public safety and the collective well-being. But that is because I choose to care, because I choose to sacrifice of my means and materials in the times and places that I find necessary. The goal should not be, that we allow people their freedoms except where it is inconvenient to the collective purpose. The goal should be, to empower upright and moral citizens to understand their innate ability to make the world better.
Yes, this is an imperfect solution to the collective well-being. There will often be times where such individuals do not understand or accept their privilege to enrich the world of themselves; and, at the end of the cultural moment when the cards are dealt and the pot is dealt, we might find that such an approach is utterly immeritous toward the goal of preserving our common heritage. If this should happen, then that will be a great tragedy indeed; yet it won't be so great by half as the tragedy of even a single human being denied the full fruit and art of living with their full power.
EDIT: Also, I'd like to draw a line between privacy and anonymity. Privacy means I ought to have a space where nobody can exfiltrate resources from. This does not enable bullying, because bullying requires some degree of interconnection, whereas privacy must be specifically preserved where intercomnectivity is the state of business. Anonymity, I grant you, does allow bullying (to the degree that anonymity allows you to interconnect while refusing to allow other parties to identify you.) I will entertain conversations about the dangers of anonymity, because I think there is a happy middle between "don't track me" and "interact with me as a known quantity."
Surveillance is antithetical to both privacy and anonymity. To the degree it is antithetical to privacy, I will fight it tooth and nail, and forever condemn the sniveling ne'er-do-wells that think themselves privileged in _my_ spaces.
> I also respectfully disagree. I'm a sincere egoist, so I say that: no, public safety is not a "higher priority" than _my_ rights, nor is it of a higher priority than any individuals' rights.
Isn't the problem with this position that you cannot reach "universal rights" if you approach from individual self-interest. What if my particular circumstances mean that I don't want everyone to have Right X? I see egoism and universal rights as incompatible. Perhaps I look at it the wrong way.
> I think the solution to bullying, and generally the unwelcome encroachment of others into our spaces, is some ability to rebuke the interlocutors' access to our space entirely, permanently, and even prematurely.
This doesn't handle the very real threat of Grooming, or unrecognised bullying. Children will tolerate quite a lot before they even realise it's not healthy.
I am a strong proponent of privacy, but I don't see an easy solution to children online. It shouldn't be black box, as they can easily end up on the wrong side of the internet. But it equally should not be a white box.
I can't agree with this. I'm a staunch privacy advocate by normal millennial standards(by HN standards I'm probably middle of the road for the privacy concerned group)
But certainly privacy is a privilege, maybe one you get de facto at some point, somewhat akin to voting, but obviously in certain situations people lose their privacy rights. In an extreme situation you could look at a prisoner, but also consider that we allow people to be monitored at work - and we have legal methods of removing privacy as well - a search warrant for example, or sexual predator lists.
>Computers are nothing less and nothing more than an amplification system for the mind.
The same could be said about automobiles being an amplification system for the legs, but you have to get a license to drive one because of the destruction that they can cause.
It is likewise with a computer; people here, of all places, should understand how destructive a computer can be. Look at how people are polluting their minds with misinformation and divisiveness on social media, or in more extreme cases, doing things like using bot nets to DDoS websites. Children don't have enough understanding of the world to be given privacy. If a toddler locks themselves in the bathroom, you shouldn't have to respect their privacy if you think they have gotten into the medicine cabinet, you open the door.
I think the whole concept of remote administered tests is ludicrous, a physical presence with a proctor is the minimum standard for a trustworthy results that's not 1:1 video chatting for the entire duration(and even that can be gamed to some extent). To me it makes absolute sense in a competitive academic environment like a school to have keyloggers and network IP monitoring if you want any semblance of fairness. Make kids use a certain, monitored machine for schoolwork. Otherwise those who can afford to and/or have the propensity will cheat. Unless of course you're fine with academic achievement being an even stronger proxy for class.
I'm not saying kids can't have privacy mind you, and especially not that we should give up privacy entirely. But I don't think that kids should have a right to privacy with regards to their education.
I wonder how much harm the constant surveillance does.
We are training kids that someone is always watching. That they have to censor their thoughts and hold in their feelings rather than talk about them with others for fear of it being determined to be 'wrong'. How many of these kids will be suspended, expelled, medicated, etc for things that were harmless? I think this surveillance will cause these kids to be less independent and delay their maturation because it's safer to do what you're told, not explore questions you have, and suppress your opinions.
The number of conversations I had in school that would have gotten me I'm trouble today would be a lot. I would guess they would have expelled me for some of it, even though it was totally harmless.
Where is the cost benefit analysis? Or is this just another 'common sense' solution because 'think of the children'?
I often think about this in regards to rules enforcement... as we get better and better at catching rule breakers because of increased surveillance, we run into an issue where the rules do not make sense anymore.
This is because our current rules were designed for a world with worse enforcement. Take, for example, the speed limit and ticket costs. Both the speed limit and price of a ticket for breaking the speed limit were set for a world of imperfect enforcement. We assume someone who is pulled over for speeding was probably speeding many times before they were pulled over, so we have the penalty set relatively high. The penalty was not designed to be given every time someone goes 2 MPH over the speed limit.
We really need to rethink the rules if we drastically change enforcement.
It's a _limit_, not the speed at which you have to go. Just go 5 MPH under the limit and you'll be fine. Of course if you always are on the edge there will be moments when you go over the edge, but that's on you.
> Both the speed limit and price of a ticket for breaking the speed limit were set for a world of imperfect enforcement.
I don't have a strong argument against the price of a ticket being set higher because of all this, it does make some sense. But the speed limit isn't lower than it should because we didn't use to catch every fast driver.
It's low because, as drivers tend to forget, they are not alone around the roads and the security of pedestrian (and mostly _children_), cyclists etc. requires, among other things, low speed.
"But the speed limit isn't lower than it should because we didn't use to catch every fast driver."
That's actually how they set some limits. They know that people go over the limit by a specific amount when doing traffic studies and will adjust the speed limit below the safe speed they want. They just dropped a 50mph zone to 40mph because they had too many people doing 60mph in it, which was associated with more accidents at one intersection. Now everyone does 50mph in the 40mph zone. This area did not have pedestrian or cyclist safety incidents driving this change. Getting hit at 40mph vs 50mph isnt going to make much difference to them.
"It's a _limit_, not the speed at which you have to go. Just go 5 MPH under the limit and you'll be fine."
I agree, but the topic is about enforcement. This example is a perfect illustration of how lackadaisical enforcement can influence society's views on the subject and lead to perverse system design, compliance, and enforcement.
They are generally setting automatic tickets at a low cost and only for significant infractions. I think in MD it's like $20-25 per ticket and only when doing more than 10-15mph over.
That said, I agree with the sentiment that some penalties and rules do not make sense. Even the people who run the system know it. It's just that they get to use law enforcement or prosecutorial discretion to decide who to punish and who to let go. Which I believe fundamentally undermines the rule of law and leads to biased enforcement. I guess that's one good thing about the automated system - it treats everyone the same.
Some things that some people view as mistakes are not necessarily large mistakes. For example, people swear all the time, and yet some schools might expel or suspend the child if the child is caught swearing.
Having such a reaction to something so minor is a problem.
Likely anecdotal, but I recall doing a bad behavior (throwing another kids binder over the school fence), that absolutely mortified me in second grade.
Another one was me kicking an exit door of a school when a friend was deliberately holding the exit door closed.
Looking back, the punishments felt arbitrary based on some random factor that I didn’t understand as a kid. Throwing a binder meant monetary compensation (described by the principal). Kicking the door didn’t have a definitive reason, but I assumed general “rambunctiousness” was to blame.
Maybe I’m passing the buck here, but I didn’t completely understand the result of my actions, and felt, as an adult, was an obvious opportunity to teach a kid something enlightening but instead just got passed to my parents who were happy to punish me without context. I’m 38
One data point for you to add to the arbitrary column...
One of my children chucked their school laptop out of their bedroom window which then landed on concrete fifty feet below. The display was shattered, so I emailed the school and informed them that the laptop had been dropped and damaged, and can we order a replacement. They let us know the replacement cost, and we picked up the new laptop a few weeks later but were never billed for the expense :)
They owned up to it and were so upset about having done it that the discipline/consequences imposed were pretty mild. I made the point several times to them that they were incredibly lucky that no one was hit by it on the way down, and that they absolutely can't do it again. I'm pretty sure they hadn't thought that through.
> Having such a reaction to something so minor is a problem.
Swearing is one of those things that ranges from not being a problem to being a big problem. Kids using words because they are forbidden is not a problem. A kid swearing in front of teachers to signal disrespect is something that needs to be addressed. A child swearing at another child in anger, then it may be necessary to unwind what's going on and that may determine if harsh consequences are necessary. While I have never heard of a child being suspended/expelled over swearing, yet if it did happen it was probably due to something else going on.
Part of the problem with this surveillance is, at best, we can flag conversations that correlate with certain outcomes. Things like understanding context and motivation take discourse, yet understanding context and motivation are essential when considering a course of action.
(Of course the other part of the problem are the privacy implications, which is horrific if even a tiny fraction of what the article claims is true.)
> A kid swearing in front of teachers to signal disrespect is something that needs to be addressed.
… because an early understanding of the educational system might lead to incorrect voting later in life, with potentially serious consequences for said system's tax revenues.
Mad? No, I just forgot that I'm on American VC News, so it's necessary to assume a stuffed-shirt stick-up-the-arse inability to grasp any literary device.
An observation: starting a few years back, it is now virtually impossible for teenagers (well anyone really) to do stupid things without being filmed and potentially exposed globally. Everybody carries smartphones. I did lots of dumb shit when I was younger. Thank god no-one was livestreaming it to the world back then.
We could do away with cellphones and the always present cameras but addicts act like addicts and will explain how that’s impossible and would be really terrible etc. Because teenage girls really need Instagram or all human progress is nullified, or something like that.
At the same time, there is both pushback to this very thing and some children have their world broadened in ways that are helpful. Maybe it is my age having some effect on my attitude, but that last bit is what made the INternet so magical... back in the days of AOL chat rooms. I had access to a lot of people and some of them simply accepted me for me. So much better than folks asking my friends why they were even friends with me or folks following me around laughing just within hearing.
I really wish I had internet sooner just for the comfort.
> it is now virtually impossible for teenagers (well anyone really) to do stupid things without being filmed and potentially exposed globally
You say it like they didnt get everyone to gather around and film them while they did dumb shit in the hope that it would 'go viral' on tik tok and make them into the next meme.
> We are training kids that someone is always watching. That they have to censor their thoughts and hold in their feelings rather than talk about them with others for fear of it being determined to be 'wrong'.
This isn’t entirely new. Without context you could be describing many religions.
Some do, but what most people fear is the judgement of their peers and community. Eg being burned alive but promised forgiveness in eternity is not a deal most people would accept.
But the civil authorities didn't. You'd be still burned at the stake, but if you agreed with the people burning you that you deserved it you'd get a good afterlife.
The problem I have is the internet was wild when I grew up and it was the place to escape life. Now the internet is worse than real life and real life has been reduced to staying at home because of covid (your experience varies greatly by geo location).
Tor, freenet and other networks that are actively hostile to the majority of users now feel like how the www felt in 1997. Here's hoping that their inherent nonmonetizability keeps them from going down the same path.
Parents should just take their children out of school, and home school or 'unschool' them.
Regarding your question, this is an example of people choosing to do something because they can and not because they should. In fact, the surveillance is likely a violation of the 4th Amendment of the US Bill of Rights.
Parent's don't have the time or experience, usually needing to work. Teaching impressionable young minds is a skill, not a "let them lose and hope it works" situation. I would also trust a curriculum that has been vetted and tried, not parental indoctrine; or skipping some subjects entirely, like anti-CRT proponents have shown.
Yes, luckily there are some very good resources available now for parents. Khan Academy, IXL, Well Trained Mind, etc.
I should add that I think elementary school is valuable for children, as most of that is social and it's with the same teacher and fellow students for most of the day. Digital surveillance starts in middle school and high school, which is when students are old enough to start self-directed learning.
It's worth thinking about how many parents would have to pull their children out of school due to concerns over privacy invasion before the school system decided to change its policy or tech stack.
I live in a smallish town/city and you can very easily become connected with a variety of home schooling networks that help kids socialize, parents learn from other parents, etc. I've never really encountered a stereotypical "anti-social homeschool kid" in the wild.
I second this. I've had friends who were homeschooled that were probably better socialized, more well behaved, etc than a significant number of the 'regular' kids at my school. Of course there could be some observation bias if the truly antisocial homeschool kids never go anywhere to meet them, while the antisocial school kids are forced to go to school (which probably makes their situation even worse).
> We are training kids that someone is always watching.
This probably goes down better in religious societies. It used to be that this "someone" was an amorphous deity. A child was constantly told they are under the watchful eye of someone-up-there.
Now it's the outsourced, underpaid Creepy Joe from this week's surveillance technology company.
This is pretty outrageous. This constant need to fully control and monitor everything your kids are doing is getting out of hand and will by itself lead to severe problems and mental issues for the future generations.
I mean, who didnt share or look at some porn when they were 10 years old? Would it be worth it for a whole army of teachers and consultants to descend on you and file an “incident report” and a “follow up” and “de brief” for this? What a colossal waste of resources and money. The $300k for the software could be better spent elsewhere.
And yes, one suicide was apparently prevented, but then here we are again at the same argument, its like the one in the current apple/child porn case.
Should we all get monitored just because of one positive but disproportionately small outcome?
It's the digitization of the mindset where parents wouldn't let their kids go a mile to the park alone, or go play with a friend on the next block, etc. By the way, there's an app called life360 that's increasingly popular with parents of high school kids. It tracks the user everywhere, monitors driving speed, that sort of thing, so the parents can observe their children at all times. Some have even demanded that their children continue using it in college. It's a goddamn digital panopticon and it needs to stop.
I know someone who's in college and still has to have this on her phone (it's not conditional on her paying for something, as far as I know she pays for her car). It's very odd. She's also not allowed to drive on the highway either (if she won't learn now, then when will she?).
Outcome of this is whenever we see her someone else drives, so maybe it's just a long con to save her money on gas.
> Some have even demanded that their children continue using it in college.
This seems like it needs to be fixed with legislation. Make it illegal to track others' location without their explicit consent (hopefully this is already the case, now that I think about it), and also make it illegal for anything whatsoever to be conditional on giving that consent (e.g., make it illegal to tell your kids "I'm only helping to pay for your college tuition, or letting you drive my car, if you install Life360").
Sure this app is kind of creepy but making it illegal for a parent to demand it? Hey great, instead of my wonderful parents paying for my college I'm going to report them to the cops, and send them to jail! That will show them! Of course now there's nobody to cover my college tuition but whatever.
You are a mini-tyrant in training. Thinking the world's problems can all be fixed by making something illegal. Encouraging the government to interfere in intra-family relations. Never actually thinking about how any of these policies would play out. Insanity.
He is tyranically fighting parental tyrany? How ironic.
For every happy hamily I know one that's fucked up.
Once you are 18, you are free to escape abusive parents, and that often means you loose their financial support. Sometimes thats what you have to do
Parents who want to pay for your college are abusive? I think you use that word extremely liberally.
You are 100% correct that a person ought to be entirely independent upon reaching adulthood, if he/she so chooses. You know how you do it? "Mom, Dad, I'm not going to play by your rules any more, thanks but no thanks, I'm going to make my own way out there in the world." How successful are you going to be as an independent person if you don't have the balls to make a simple statement like that, if instead of declaring independence, your only means of resolving this conflict is by calling the cops and sending your parents to jail because they "abused" you by asking you to install some app?
"Parents who want to pay for your college are abusive? I think you use that word extremely liberally."
Parenting is not all about money. Some parents have a very specific and tyrannical idea of how their kids 'should' turn out, and will not hesitate to spend money, beatings or literal blackmail to achieve it.
Think of a wealthy father that beats his daughter because her behaviour is 'improper', or forces daughter/son into marriage. Or of Eton College which is stupidly elite and expensive, yet famous for beatings. This stuff is common enough that I've witnessed some of it, and it's not pretty.
I am not claiming the proposal on offer here would be of any help, just trying to clarify the issue
Pretty sure that beatings (and blackmail too) are already covered in the criminal statutes of every state. Requesting that a child, especially an adult child, install an app, is not, and should not be.
With all due respect, you've gone way, way out on a tangent that has nothing to do with the original statement or my initial reply.
Ummm, any kid heading off to college is allowed to say no. What the world doesn't need is cops and judges deciding mundane issues like what apps he/she has on their phone and sending parents to jail for disagreeing.
What else can we make illegal? How about a parent requiring their kid to eat broccoli. How about demanding the kid maintain a C-average before joining a sports team. Let's also make it illegal for a parent to ask the kid to do some basic chores before playing video games. Surely you have some more ideas while we're at it...
The only way college students could be meaningfully freed from parental supervision is with tuition, room, and board affordable on a student’s earning power.
That seriously depends on where you live in relation to the school you want to go to. It's really the same in the US. One difference is that I'm only aware of the US having the land grant system where many large state schools were given chunks of land away from any city to start agricultural colleges. That leads to the situation where many large and prestigious universities are nowhere near where people live, so you really must live at the school.
It came out of kink. Communication and consent in that case is rather important since the difference between rape and battery and a fun night is rather thin. For some getting a toilet brushed vigorously stirred in their privates is a good time for most it isn't.
Trying to apply that to normal people is not only bizarre but actively harmful. A much better one is harm minimization, everything people do is bad for them, we just want to make it the least bad it can be.
When you start using that lens pretty much all our laws which deal with children are there to make adults feel better and nothing to do with actually protecting children. E.g. sexting is the safest way to have sex. It is also the only way to have sex that two 12 year olds will be arrested and put on the sex offender registry for.
I will also point out that we are happy to wave the consent banner when it is convenient and hide it away when it is not. Where is consent in the workplace? In our economic system? Eldercare? Marketing? Data collection? Drone attacks? And on and on. We basically run our society on meme morality.
I think the kids should just refuse to wear the device or install the app. The parents want the kid to succeed have good grades, go to college, etc. if the parents can't be persuade by common sense and logic then the kid can leverage the success in order to persuade the parents to not require the app. What are the parents going to do, kick him out of the house and make him homeless? I know that it is easier said then done but still that is the only option I can think about.
I'll be teaching my children how to use the most tinfoil floss hardware/software so they don't have a digital profile they don't want before they are 18.
The pinephone and similar are great for anyone under 12, and hopefully will get more usable soon.
If all citizens were locked away in a padded cell, the government would prevent all homicide, overdoses, rape, etc. Just because something prevents a suicide doesn't make it a good thing. I know you're saying the same thing, I'm just putting it more starkly.
There are other ways of preventing suicide, homicide, overdoses, rape, etc, which don't violate privacy, security, etc.
This is the point it’s coming to. When “the other side” says “one death is too many”, I’m almost tempted to scream “one death is not enough.”
If we’ve literally made tragedy impossible, there’s no way we haven’t traded away a disproportionate amount of freedom to get there.
This is really going to sound dumb, but this kind of creeping surveillance is the biggest reason I hope we can make self-sufficient off-planet colonies. I honestly believe that the trend toward complete surveillance and control in the name of complete safety is irreversible, and the only way to escape it is to literally move to where they cannot physically reach you.
This strategy is also doomed to failure. We’re talking about kids whose brains are in full-time adapt-and-learn mode. They will create other language to talk about these things that will completely fly over the heads of the adults and the software. I remember being in eighth grade where kids would make fun of a teacher to their face without their knowledge.
One friend's dad had playboy magazines. Another had videos. And another had games where if you knew the password (we did) it would show some 8 bit graphics with nudity.
It wasn't about sexual arousal. It was just about curiosity. Hell, my 6 year old tries to see my butt all the time. Because it's my butt and it's usually covered.
To be fair, I think a lot of modern internet porn is probably way more depraved than porn that existed pre-internet, and there is a virtually infinite supply of it available for free. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of people, especially young people, who are addicted to porn.
Personally, I think it’s best to avoid porn completely.
Not even the lingerie section in mail-order catalogues? Kids use what they have. And yes, sexual content is a normal thing. just talk to kids about it, and why they are too young watching that stuff. You cannot prevent anyways.
Anyway, what I was trying to say was, pre-internet it kinda required post-puberty hormones to be motivated enough to clear the hurdles to accessing porn.
Also, to another commenter’s point, the porn I was able to access was amazingly innocent by comparison to what is probably commonly available now.
BBS's are most certainly not the internet. They were most often stand-alone and independent, with offline networking in the form of FidoNet ("offline" in that FidoNet boards would dial up at regular times to transmit and receive messages from other nodes).
BBS's entirely predate the Internet's general availability (although of course the Internet is older than most people realize).
They kinda melded a little at the end of the BBS era and the beginning of the public internet era with integrated email and whatnot and you can still get to some via telnet, but they were distinct entities / networks / protocols from the internet.
I do remember a Playboy when it came out in 1971. The Willy Rey issue (girl on the stock certificate). Nice looking.
Not only were Playboys pretty rare, but they were a different kettle of fish than any modern adult images/video.
Are times better or worse? I couldn't tell you. Lots of differences. Many women never have children. Divorce is common. People aren't raised on farms with all the attendant physical realities of life. Slavery was common in most societies. People got married at young ages. Sex has been secretive or not depending on the era.
Probably the worst thing about porn is a scarring of the mind, sex as non-participatory act, exotica as normal, staring at screens, addictive behavior, the internet as a net negative.
Well said. Also, the whole argument of "one bad thing prevented" is fundamentally flawed. It is not possible to evaluate how many bad things it causes, because, unless somehow clear enough for our dumb human observational skills, those are brushed under "would have happened anyways".
If schools and governments wanted to help prevent suicides, the answer isn't difficult. You try to improve social security, and otherwise make an effort to foster safe environments.
Stranger monitoring everything you do and might punish you for it... is exactly the opposite.
Right before COVID hit, I called my local school system out for installing spyware on my son and daughter's chromebooks. These were not provided by the school, they were bought by me. The spyware included a keylogger, something that forwarded every URL requested, a screenshotter, and a popunder autoclicker (yes, ad fraud).
After a few emails back and forth, I sent one in demanding to see a search warrant and to know what horrible behavior the school believed gave them the right to search my computer. About 10 minutes later the spyware was removed from my son's school Chrome account and I got a call from the school system CIO who was making extra-sure I wasn't going to take further legal action.
The lawyer thought it would not have mattered if the school provided the hardware or not. There was no reason to be looking for crime, without at least a warrant. Additionally, the Chromebook might be plugged into my home network, where it might be used to surviel more than my child's academic usage. The fact uniformed police officers were on the school's payroll was enough to turn it into a constitutional issue.
It is really important that parents be willing to stand up for our children's rights. They don't know better, and they don't have the money. And yes, as a parent, it's worth spending money on.
> uniformed police officers were on the school's payroll
This is nuts. Even in countries that are quite authoritarian politically there's way less policing of boring daily life. You are living in a ridiculous police state.
The growth of the police and prison state in the US is a big reason behind the defund the police movement. While even the majority is starting to feel quite policed, it has always been felt more strongly in minority communities.
This is normal in American high schools. Even in the 1980s, when I was in high school and before school shootings, we had one or two officers on the grounds every day. It was their full-time job.
I think it depends on the area and school size. It seems like the larger or more urban schools tend, or tended, to have police or even security guards. A lot of the smaller rural schools did not.
"Or even"? Aren't guards the much much "lighter", more reasonable option? Guards usually just sit there watching the CCTV (often dicking around on their phone instead), they don't have the same ability to wield state-sanctioned violence that the police has.
It depends. You can have unarmed guards that are basically as you describe. Although the comment about being on their phone is commonly applicable to the police as well. Those guards are practically worthless since all they will be doing is calling the police if something happens - something the staff could do. You could also have armed guards. Most states have licensing requirements for armed and even unarmed guards. They can have some state-sanctioned violence too. For example, felonies committed in ones presence are enforced by state licensed guards (not much different than citizen's arrest except because one has a state issued license the court bias is with you rather than against you). And an example of a felony would be striking a teacher (or guard/police) which is aggravated assualt (in my state). Another thing is that many times the schools only want to hire retired LEOs for their guard positions. This can give them more leeway due to prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion as well as court bias.
I agree that they shouldn't be surveilled. I wonder why schools are allowed to use the software if the lawyer thinks it's not legal. I assume the school is still using the software on the other students devices. Also, I believe there is case law (that I disagree with) that shows law enforcement does not need a warrant to search school property, like lockers but might include school provided hardware. The final thing is that they don't need a warrant if people agree to a search. Obviously you didn't agreed and they removed the software, but ostensibly they are using consent of the student handbook or some such thing for the rest of the students.
My school district issues Chromebooks (mandatory).
Buried in the school usage guide/hand-out is a paragraph that states that the school reserves the right to enable the microphone and camera at any time, with no warning or notice required by the school faculty.
It’s ridiculous and I’m not sure I can do anything about it.
At the very least you could make sure the device is powered down when not in use.
A piece of tape over the camera would solve about half of the problem, and is just a good idea in general.
If you want to be a bit more paranoid, set up a separate network for the school-issued devices, and turn those networks off except during school hours.
Or, if you're looking for a social solution, print out thay paragraph, take it to the next meeting of the school board, and demand to know why they want to record your child while they're getting out of the shower. These devices will be in children's bedrooms the majority of the time, and if they can record at any time, with no warning, they will record images that would be considered by many to be very illegal.
> Or, if you're looking for a social solution, print out thay paragraph, take it to the next meeting of the school board, and demand to know why they want to record your child while they're getting out of the shower. These devices will be in children's bedrooms the majority of the time, and if they can record at any time, with no warning, they will record images that would be considered by many to be very illegal.
yep, this is the solution...
"why do you need the option to record my kids?"
They probably don't have a good answer, and the parents will want to know.
> Buried in the school usage guide/hand-out is a paragraph that states that the school reserves the right to enable the microphone and camera at any time, with no warning or notice required by the school faculty.
A few years ago there were cases of cameras being enabled by faculty who observed teenagers in their bedrooms, doing something or another, I can't remember if there were salacious details (nudity, sex?) involved - but it was a scandal at the time. Now it's normal?
You're thinking of WebcamGate from 2010. It resulted in a civil case, and the FBI and US Attorney Office investigated, but they declined to proceed with any criminal charges. The school district had 66,000 images from students webcams.
Make sure every single parent and child knows about this paragraph. And the name of every individual that put it there. At every school meeting, ask them why that paragraph is buried, instead of prominently displayed on the laptop itself. Ask them to install cameras in their homes, controlled by you.
Don't allow it in the house while not in use specifically for school. Keep it in a faraday cage at the least. All sorts of ways of combating this type of bullshit, and it's also a teachable moment for your kids. The problem is this is similar behavior to those wearing tinfoil hats. What used to be signs of crazy are now normal day things.
I don't think a Faraday cage solves the problem. Monday at school, the device gets a remote command to record that evening. Then while it's in the Faraday cage Monday evening, it records to its hard drive. Tuesday back at school, it uploads everything it recorded.
So keep it in the car. Don't leave it turned on. There's a lot of things one can do to keep a computer from recording when they don't want it to. You're just trying really hard to come up with excuses of not trying and to just sit back and let it happen. It's pretty disgusting.
Keeping it in the car would work, but not turning it on wouldn't unless the battery is removable. Modern computers can be set up in UEFI to power on at a certain time.
> You're just trying really hard to come up with excuses of not trying and to just sit back and let it happen. It's pretty disgusting.
For your own kids, how about this? Open up the Chromebook and disconnect the camera and mic. Get USB ones that can be plugged in when needed for Zoom lessons and then unplugged immediately afterwards. Reconnect the built-in ones right before you return it.
That's a toothless rule. Is letting it fall by accident allowed? So if any questions arise, just say "oh, I broke it by accident". The school board disrespects you already, so why would you respect any of their rules?
At leaat in my district... They make you pay to fix it (with their vendor) or buy a new one. They own it, you essentially lease it. And it is required. Not sure if they give your kid detention, call CPS, or something else.
In my district, kids with unpaid fees were not allowed to graduate high school. This included everything from unreturned textbooks to damage to school property.
It could be illegal in some states. For example, if it records people in a private setting who did not consent, like relatives.
I absolutely hate the mandatory use of laptops and such below high school level. I think our local district is starting it in 5th or 6th grade. Granted the school also whitelists what snacks are allowed, down to what brand of chips, and completely disallows things like meat and cheese...
It is the chance of a lifetime to teach your child valuable lessons that they absolutely will need for the futre.
Seperation of work/school time and device with personal. They should use their school device for school stuff and when they finish their work for the day, power it off and move to their personal life.
Is that not just for accessibility though? Surely the more affluent kids just use their own, more powerful computers for homework. I'm guessing the Chromebooks are just for the lower-class kids. I could be wrong though.
My son has a nice, recent model laptop. He borrowed a Chromebook from the school last year because he refused to install their test monitoring spyware on his personal machine.
It absolutely is. It's the justification given for the ramping up of the drug war in the 80s and the crime bill in the 90s that made the US the largest prison system in the world both relative to the population and absolute numbers. When you hear "think of the children," run.
What scares me is that this is a generation of kids that have been broken and domesticated. For whom tyranny is normal and natural. What happens when they are grown up and put in charge?
A generation of kids growing up in what, the earliest known days of antiquity? It's the same shit just from a different hole as far as I'm concerned.
That being said, I am grateful that I escaped school before the administration properly got a hold of computers. I went to a good school, so I doubt it would be hugely Orwellian, but the point stands - kids need separation.
There are multiple possible outcomes - one is that you will teach people to properly compartmentalize what they say in the family/among friends from what they say in public/in school.
Actually, coming from Czech Republic, this was the norm when the communist party was still in power - it was clear that you had to say different things (or rather, not to say certain things) in public from what you could talk about with family and close trusted friends.
Children have been taught this from young age, resulting in adults being to do this compartmentalization almost automatically. No wonder, it was a survival skill basically - you never know who could be an informant or just opportunist to use any anti-party things you say against you for personal gain.
Its actually quite interesting to see people who don't come from this background and actually say what they really think in the public! ;-)
My kid and I both hate the invigilation trends in education, but he is far from broken/domesticated. Instead, it is inducing him to rebel against it. He is actively looking for ways to defeat this garbage tech.
In all likelihood it won't be received well. Almost no one cares about privacy, and if there's any resistance to using an alternate service it will not be used.
Drama much? I'm dead against surveillance, but that doesn't mean freedom inures in being maximally wild and uncontrollable. This is also not a new phenomenon, as far back as the Victorian era adults would complain that 'children should be seen and not heard.'
Hyperbole is rarely conducive to productive discussion.
Is this hyperbole or a serious statement? Kids broken and domesticated? tyranny normal and natural?
What tyranny? What domesticated kids? You are living in a weird world where everything would be a slippery slope, if you truly believe this. You might need some help here.
I suspect that lockdowns look a lot like prison to an irrational, developing child who's subject to surveillance and not allowed to see their friends for a year.
Even outside of lockdowns, helicopter parenting seemed like a big problem.
My kid's high school is located in a part of town that is largely warehouses and hotels for business travelers. We joke that it's all just another warehouse with a different inventory.
Of course.. By that means, everything is a prison because there are restrictions. A joke about type of building is not the same as kids broken and domesticated or tyranny.
At the least, these supporting comments make me think that HN groupthink has slipped so far into a fantasy world full of hyperbole that no meaningful conversation can be had. Either your kids are in a cult or you are in a cult. I can only feel sorry for you folks.
FWIW, I have 2 kids and they have a very healthy life with school, sports and time to play with their friends.
Is this your assumption or you are doing this to your kids? My kids had remote schools, but they also went and met with their friends (albeit a smaller group than usual). Most of the parents took enough precaution and given the age group, we were all comfortable with kids being with each other.
Helicopter parenting is not related to the top level comment at all.
I don't think any parent I know actually prevented their kids from meeting their friends other than at the very very beginning of the pandemic (and before vaccinations). Internet hysterics aside, I think most parents appreciate their kids have mental health needs.
(Unless you think schoolmates are friends, in which case I have news for you...)
I'd be interested to see a study for a link between the suicide rate and the degree of surveillance in one's life, separated from the influence of the social networks that already has been studied.
It seems to be quite obvious that the lack of personal space would cause or exacerbate the mental issues. However, the modern society tends to ignore the problems that cannot be easily tracked or assigned a metric.
Why do we complain only when it's done to children?
I'll never have an open mic installed in my house (alexa, google etc...)
Yet it seems the generation of young engineers that built these things sees nothing wrong with them. Why? Maybe, because they had helicopter parents and were chaperoned and supervised 100% of the time during their childhoods.
They have grown to see surveillance as inherently benign, because during their entire childhood they were surveiled by well meaning adults.
> In emails and chat messages, students discussed violent impulses, eating disorders, abuse at home, bouts of depression and, as one student put it, “ending my life.”
Of course the email and chat apps had prominent "Your messages may be monitored, including by your teachers" notifications, right? Kids weren't misled into thinking their private conversations were private, right?
The point is they have no choice. There is no 'I don't want to be monitored' button. Just a message that says 'you are our bitch and there is nothing you can do about it'. The same as every other TOS for services that have become essential in our society and economy.
Don't they have the choice of communicating some other device or method? They are not forced to use the school computer. Many of them have phones, or a family computer.
It's not just the computer. They tend to be forced to use Drive, email, chat, etc provided by the school to meet their collaboration/participation part of the rubric.
Absolutely not. In my world, a disclaimer is the line between merely "not OK", and "criminal hacking punishable by prison time".
That's how users of RAT* software are treated - what makes this different? A legal notice they hid as best they could? Currently, that might make it legal, but morally it makes no difference.
But I didn't suggest a prominent notice because that makes it better (though it does - if I were spied on, I'd want to know). I suggested it because that would make the victims of surveillance fight it. You can't rebell against what you don't know about.
Mentor: "Hi! This is your mentor. We've noticed that you're suicidal, depressed, paranoid and generally not doing that well."
Student: "How do you know that?"
Mentor: "Oh, we've been monitoring everything you chat about with your friends and family. So we basically know all your secrets, if you've chatted about them in the past 1.5 years."
Has any spy tech ever left? I remember vaguely some public discussion about CCTV somewhere in the mid 90s and now I live safely in the knowledge that I can be tracked 24/7 whenever I enter the city.
"Tracked" is a bit much, for good and bad. There are potential benefits to prolific tracking, but there has to be a system of integration to realize them, which is totally lacking. In Shenzhen, if someone steals your wallet, the police can collect camera data from all sorts of sources around the time and place and track the thief down, and you have a reasonable expectation of getting your property back. In random US city, even if there are likely many cameras that could provide similar tracking capabilities, police will just shrug. So we don't even get any of the theoretical benefits to all this surveillance, all we're left with is random abuse.
I firmly believe that one of our greatest current failures as a society is the extent with which we completely accept these types of dystopic conditions - every single action we take and word we type is surveilled, permanently stored with zero recourse, analyzed or blocked by untransparent third-party data leviathans that share few of our own interests, and often sold, shared, and completely neglected while data breaches happen en masse. Not only do we have virtually no ability to opt out of this, but these practices now begin the moment someone is born.
When I was younger I spent a lot of my time advocating for privacy, informing people of how bad the state of surveillance was, how bad it would be in the future, and what we could do to improve things. Eventually this turned out to be very bad for my mental health, because I not only realized most people didn't give a shit, but also that no matter what I did, I had no power to improve things by what felt like a even single epsilon.
With the advances we're making in hardware and machine learning, I think we are setting ourselves up for future disasters that we have barely begun to imagine - our entire society's communications and thoughts are owned by everyone except ourselves, and our ability to analyze, predict, and censor the populace with this extreme centralization of power and data is currently being scaled up even more by every tech/ad/communications corporation (and government) in the world.
I still try to do what I can, but it feels like I'm able to do less and less with each passing year; I am constantly forced to use products and services that do terrible things with the data they collect on me, yet it is increasingly becoming something outside of my control. Perhaps this makes it obvious why normal people rarely try to use privacy-preserving software and practices: they recognize how difficult and hopeless the endeavor is, and they'd rather not dedicate their lives to such an impossible feat such as communicating privately with their friends and family. The only things I can really hope for here is that we get an actual data protection law or basic consumer bill of rights in countries like the US, but I don't see this happening any time soon.
I also predict that the general populace will recognize the vast importance of this issue in the future (whether that is +5 or +30 years, I have no clue), but likely only after some very terrible events occur (it would seem the current state of advertisements, data breaches, mass surveillance, and censorship is nowhere near what it will take). This comment turned out to be more negative and hopeless than I had wanted, so I'll add that I also donated to the EFF - they seem to be pretty principled and helpful in this area, and they also sent me a cool T-shirt. I'm fortunate that I'm able to use software like Signal/IRC/Matrix with my close friends, but I wish that everyone else could be given the right of private self-expression and communiucation as well.
> ...but these practices now begin the moment someone is born.
Sadly, no. They begin long before someone is born. A decade ago, Target was discussing how they could identify that someone was pregnant, and start targeting ads to them. Plus, the art of making it not look like they were doing this.
I'm a bit late to the "... yeah, the tech industry has turned evil!" bandwagon, but am actively moving away from most of it lately. I've gotten rid of my Apple stuff (or am moving away from the rest), won't run Win11, colo a server to host stuff, have been moving to Matrix, etc. It's a bit of a pain, certainly, but I've also been perfectly willing to go with a "If I can't come up with a sane way to do it, it's not worth doing" attitude towards that which I can't do.
Let’s also not forget all the genetic testing companies (with questionable security practices) that parents take before their child is born. Private companies are hoarding access to your child’s genes, likelihood of disabilities, and future health issues before they’re even born.
I think this is made worse by our society's fundamental inability to embrace ourselves in all our humanity. My iPhone has a Kids' mode, it does not have an adult mode, and it still insists that I really meant to type "ducking" and that any app that could potentially show me a boob has no place in decent society. As long as we're unable or unwilling to acknowledge that each of us are fully rounded humans, with all the brilliance and flaws that come with that, and not just failed robots or fallen pariahs from the One True Way of Being, this kind of thing will be not just unfortunate but oppressive and dangerous.
android has never changed the word to ducking, but when using voice to text it will happily add asterisks to my messages. I turn it off, but every gboard update just turns it back on. I've tried other keyboards but gboard is the least difficult to use in nearly every situation where i need to send a message (one handed, two handed, voice to text, swype or whatever when i can't see what the screen says, etc). My least favorite is whatever samsung ships, nearly every time i hit some button that changes the size, layout, or whatever.
More to your point, though, the walled garden isn't purely in apple's realm, kindle fire has the same sort of restrictive app store, with no option to adultify it.
And having society acknowledge that everyone is hurtling to an end and that, therefore, thoughts and ideas and feelings might just be more important than whatever the current dichotomy of opinion is - well, having society acknowledge that would be nice, i suppose.
Apple doesn't want to be in the news because 5000 children saw a bare ass, and that's their shareholders' perspective. I think.
> every single action we take and word we type is surveilled, permanently stored with zero recourse, analyzed or blocked by untransparent third-party data leviathans that share few of our own interests, and often sold, shared, and completely neglected while data breaches happen en masse.
No. You have a choice. Don’t use Facebook. Don’t tweet. Don’t post comments on Hacker News. Shop in local stores. Pay cash.
I have some choices, but many of them require astronomical trade-offs in quality of life. For example, I do like the anonymity of cash, but using it for all of my bills, rent, online goods (not everything can be found in the city I'm in), and being paid exclusively in it from work is certainly not very easy (it is worse than this too - it is literally more expensive and we are seeing attempted reporting requirements for all cash transactions $600+, in addition to the ones we already have for $10k+). Even if I spent several hours a day going through tedious routines in attempt to preserve my own privacy to the utmost extent, I would still find I'm not only at a massive disadvantage in life (especially socially), but also that there's still countless sources of data on me that I simply cannot avoid (Sure you can avoid Facebook. But will everyone around you and that knows you avoid it? If not, you will still be tracked!).
To be clear, I don't advocate for a perspective of complete helplessness, there are a lot of things I do to reduce surveillance and tracking of myself. But I cannot have privacy be the sole criterion for living my life, because it would, simply put, result in a terrible life.
To get to my apartment complex requires that I drive down a street where at least one house I know of has a street-facing Ring doorbell. Is that thing always recording? Can the police obtain video from that device without a search warrant? Are the owners of that house even aware of the privacy implications behind these devices, and even if so, do they care?
I strongly agree with you that upholding privacy is not a personal choice, but a societal one. Any attempts to suggest otherwise is blaming the victim.
I feel you. Every time I read about China I think "yep we will have that in 10 years".
When the drones are switched on they'll never be switched off again.
I’m starting to think it can only be fixed with legislation.
At it stands every single incentive for businesses points toward maximizing surveillance. Product design, marketing, advertising, direct monetization of data, validating business models to investors, everything is helped by more data. The push for data is relentless and the appetite is endless.
Consumers largely don’t understand or don’t care. They talk shit about it but they don’t change their buying decisions.
I’m pessimistic about tech fixes, not because it can’t be done but because there is zero incentive. Like I said all the money and all the incentive is toward invading privacy.
Nobody is going to seriously try unless people are willing to pay for it in significant numbers. I don’t see that. Most people just don’t care or don’t understand.
There is also quite a bit of surface area to defend if you are trying to make privacy guarding OSes or browsers. Look at how hard it is to eliminate browser fingerprinting. There are so many ways to infer unique information.
One line near the beginning stands out to me though.
"...that monitors students’ school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts."
This is activity within an account that was intended for school use, or possibly, on a school issued computer. There should be an expectation of some level of lack of privacy within those areas.
If they want privacy from the school, use an account or computer the school didn't give them. Yes, some people may not have the resources to get their own. But that doesn't mean the school has to let them do anything they want on the the resource that the did give them.
I think this applies _to an extent._ Especially with how Google's been blurring the lines between a Google account being signed in and being signed in to Chrome, I think that's a somewhat unfair proposition. I signed into my work GSuite account on my personal laptop to do a quick P0 fix and Chrome decided to sign itself into my work account without asking- how helpful!
If I were a student, this means Chrome would slurp my entire (PERSONAL!) browsing history into Google, and by extent- Gaggle.
In fact, my former school district actually used Gaggle. I know this for two reasons- first, the IT manager said "oh and we get Gaggle alerts for things you do on your Google account" as a sidenote when giving the onboarding speech that no one listens to. Also, I got a warning a few times in my email for people saying dumb shit in large shared documents (yes, it flags _your_ account just for being in a docshare with people who write things that trigger the system).
If there was a little notice on documents, emails, and chats that said "${service} monitors your usage on behalf of ${schoolDistrict}" or even just required you to agree to Gaggle's TOS I might have a different opinion, but it seems as though it was perhaps intentionally obscured.
I know I said things like "ugh I have so much homework this weekend, kill me" to my friends in the hallways and in class, with the lockdown killing all those conversations and moving them online I can't imagine my parents getting an email every time I said something like that.
tl;dr these are kids- don't normalize this, please.
I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my employer used something like this to detect "security policy violations," etc. even though I keep my personal life off of my work laptop.
This is probably one of the few bad thing about Covid that impacts me. Stuff like that makes me think really hard whether home schooling is a viable option for me to avoid a good chunk of this.
Sounds like a great (after-school) opportunity to teach kids how to combat a surveillance state. An education they'll use when they're adults, imagine that!
Interesting that HN is up in arms about this but I’d imagine most still use Google which spies on our kids in order to sell them stuff and manipulate their behavior.
Why do we just accept that porn is being peddled to 10 year olds?
I don’t know if Gaggle is the right approach but they’re at least attempting to help our kids while most of Silicon Valley is just trying to monetize them.
Stepping on our rights, invading our privacy, forcing us to do various things that we would rather not do - to protect us - for our health - for the public welfare.
They need to change their tune. This one is getting really really old. Like at least 80 years old. Maybe older.
I firmly believe that a hundred years, people will look back on practices like this and shake their heads at the appalling attitudes their primitive ancestors had towards children. But I imagine that's little comfort to the kids subject to this kind of abuse.