Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School (buzzfeednews.com) 57
Gaggle monitors the work and communications of almost 5 million students in the U.S., and schools are paying big money for its services. Hundreds of company documents unveil a sprawling surveillance industrial complex that targets kids who can't opt out. Caroline Haskins writes via BuzzFeed News: Using a combination of in-house artificial intelligence and human content moderators paid about $10 an hour, Gaggle polices schools for suspicious or harmful content and images, which it says can help prevent gun violence and student suicides. It plugs into two of the biggest software suites around, Google's G Suite and Microsoft 365, and tracks everything, including notifications that may float in from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts linked to a school email address. Gaggle touts itself as a tantalizingly simple solution to a diverse set of horrors. It claims to have saved hundreds of lives from suicide during the 2018-19 school year. The company, which is based in Bloomington, Illinois, also markets itself as a tool that can detect threats of violence.
But hundreds of pages of newly revealed Gaggle documentation and content moderation policies, as well as invoices and student incident reports from 17 school districts around the country obtained via public records requests, show that Gaggle is subjecting young lives to relentless inspection, and charging the schools that use it upward of $60,000. And it's not at all clear whether Gaggle is as effective in saving lives as it claims, or that its brand of relentless surveillance is without long-term consequences for the students it promises to protect. [...] [S]tudent surveillance services like Gaggle raise questions about how much monitoring is too much, and what rights minors have to control the ways that they're watched by adults. "My sense about this particular suite of products and services is that it's a solution in search of a problem," said Sarah Roberts, a UCLA professor and a scholar in digital content moderation, "which is to say that the only way that the logic of it works is if we first accept that our children ought to be captured within a digital system, basically, from the time they're sentient until further notice."
While Gaggle claims that its tool promotes a sense of "digital citizenship," BuzzFeed News says the newly revealed documents show that students often don't understand that their work and communications are being surveilled until they violate the rules.
But hundreds of pages of newly revealed Gaggle documentation and content moderation policies, as well as invoices and student incident reports from 17 school districts around the country obtained via public records requests, show that Gaggle is subjecting young lives to relentless inspection, and charging the schools that use it upward of $60,000. And it's not at all clear whether Gaggle is as effective in saving lives as it claims, or that its brand of relentless surveillance is without long-term consequences for the students it promises to protect. [...] [S]tudent surveillance services like Gaggle raise questions about how much monitoring is too much, and what rights minors have to control the ways that they're watched by adults. "My sense about this particular suite of products and services is that it's a solution in search of a problem," said Sarah Roberts, a UCLA professor and a scholar in digital content moderation, "which is to say that the only way that the logic of it works is if we first accept that our children ought to be captured within a digital system, basically, from the time they're sentient until further notice."
While Gaggle claims that its tool promotes a sense of "digital citizenship," BuzzFeed News says the newly revealed documents show that students often don't understand that their work and communications are being surveilled until they violate the rules.
HOMESCHOOL SAYS HELLO!!!!! (Score:2)
There is no middle ground.
"Give me Homeschool or give me Death"
- Patrick Henry
Re:HOMESCHOOL SAYS HELLO!!!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
What you call homeschooling, I call "getting involved in your child's education". But I would not take mine out of a regular, public school. Why? In school, they learn how to socialize. How to coexist with other human beings.
My children are still quite young; they are struggling to learn the basics of "get X's permission to take his material, don't take it from them and don't hit them for not wanting to lend" and similar bits. At home, I would struggle too hard to find them a group of peers (and to keep it active regularly enough to become part of their day to day training).
Do I really care about the academic level of the school? Nope. And I also won't for basically all of primary school (until they are 12). All the information they get at school, they will get it reinforced at home.
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In school, they learn how to socialize.
This isn't axiomatic. Most kids are left to their own devices and will become loners. Teachers are complicit with this by favoring the popular crowd and giving them more attention.
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Most people don't actually become loners however, so that argument clearly fails the test of real-world outcomes.
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Most people don't actually become loners however, so that argument clearly fails the test of real-world outcomes.
Yeah the usual outcome is typically that everyone find their own clique, even the outcasts come together. Loners happen when one person gets rejected by all the other social groups, not just the cool kids. You don't have to be super popular but the difference between zero friends and having at least one is huge, even if it's you against the world.
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What you call homeschooling, I call "getting involved in your child's education". But I would not take mine out of a regular, public school. Why? In school, they learn how to socialize. How to coexist with other human beings.
What makes you think homeschoolers don't socialize? What they don't do (all day every day) is segregate their kids into large mobs all in the same age group.
Homeschooled kids interact with other human beings, of all age groups. In actual society, not in a weird artificial environment that is half Lord of the Flies and half jail.
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"the most mature and well socialized children" (Score:1)
Talking to an Home-Schooled child is like taking a time machine back to, say, the 1930s or 1940s or 1950s, and talking to the people in a Norman Rockwell painting or a Dorothea Lange photograph.
Causes of suicide (Score:4, Insightful)
HELLO GLOW-N!GG3RZ (Score:1)
But "the edgy teenagers... decid[ing] to sh00t up these assholes" would certainly be a moast outstanding alternative.
PS: We love our glow-n!gg3r oath-breaking overlords in the Deep State.
Glow-N!ggerz Rule!!!!!
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You know what would make me want to kill myself if I were a teenager? Knowing that I live in an inescapable surveillance state prison camp that's based solely on metrics that are at best badly understood and misapplied and just as likely to be completely bunk as not. Maybe we'll get lucky and the edgy teenagers will decide to shoot up these assholes instead of their classmates.
I was a kid when the only computers in school were trash 80s. I'm pretty sure all my papers and worksheets were read by adults, or at least there was the potential that they could be, lol.
Notes passed in class were regularly intercepted and read by adults. Granted there was some samizdat, but by definition it wasn't sanctioned by the school or produced on their equipment.
School is literally a place where kids are rounded up and adults employed by the state monitor them. I can sympathize with those who hav
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By saying "inescapable surveillance" do you really mean "completely voluntary surveillance"? Are kids being forced to spend their days staring slack-jawed at ad networks? Is "Facebook" or "Twitter" or "TikTok" or whatever ad network de jour required to attend public school?
Re: Causes of suicide (Score:2)
It''s pretty hard to opt-out of Google Classroom. Every paper a student submits, every message to their peers or teacher is hoovered up by Google.
It's easy to opt-out if you HOMESCHOOL!!!!! (Score:1)
HOMESCHOOLING SAYS HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well the article summary at least doesn't give information on how many kids engage with this, it could well be that a lot of students are just using their own non-school emails to sign up to things. It would be silly to sign up to Facebook with a school-issue email because you know that that account is only temporary.
The ad company (Score:2)
Always ready the changing fashions, slang, trends and marketing.
Ready to step in as the good censor too.
Get offered a free education from an ad company as virtue signalling charity? All that work in US education by the good censor and that free political "philanthropy"?
The result is not better US eduction but how to better study all future users.
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So many teenager stories today (Score:1)
It’s giving me JonKatz flashbacks.
(If you don’t get it, ask someone with a 7 digit user ID)
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And they probably won’t know either, because /. ate my less-than symbol...
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I actually liked some of his editorials... Never really understood the vitriol.
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https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
The surveillance Hellmouth is inevitable as fearful, weak adults advance authoritarian agendas to control everyone else, without internalizing they are someone's "everyone else".
TO WHOM DOES THE DEEP STATE ANSWER? (Score:1)
To whom does the Deep State answer [other than to their Mossad overlords]?
And to whom do the Mossad overlords answer, other than to Satan Himself?
MORE JIDF WEAK SAUCE (Score:1)
PLATONIC METHOD TRUTH-SPEAK (Score:2)
Not as bad (Score:2)
as the pervasive Chromebook. Browser as an OS spyware, I'm sure they can tie your school email to your personal one.
But, I work K-12, it's great for testing with the Kiosk that doesn't require a login and they're as cheap as the shitty netbooks like HP Streams but easier to maintain. Not hard to see how they gained the in roads here.
Schools always want everything cheap as fuck or preferably free, privacy or selling kid data was literally never even a consideration - they don't give the slightest as fucks;
It' abuse (Score:2)
NORMIE THREAD WINNER (Score:1)
You now have legions upon legions of blood brothers you never knew existed.
And our numbers are growing faster than the Glow N!gg3rz can imagine.
JIDF WEAK SAUCE (Score:1)
We stopped so many kids from committing suicide (Score:4, Insightful)
But you did absolutely nothing about preventing them from reaching the point where they wanted to kill themselves. Saying that your system is so wonderful at saving lives isn't so great if it let's their lives turn into a living hell before anything is done.
MITM (Score:2)
this is exactly what happens when you rely on a Monster In The Middle to spy on children's communication and take no responsibility to supervise them...
basically the only way around this is to take the phones off them (ban cell phones in school) and supervise screen access... most sensible education establishments do exactly that now if they are under 16...
with regards the tech they simply have email routed through them asking admins to use their MX records... nothing could go wrong with that...
v=spf1 inclu
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Indeed. They basically seem to think keeping somebody alive by force is a good thing.
I've prevented 157 suicides by myself... (Score:3)
is as effective ... as it claims (Score:2)
it's not at all clear whether Gaggle is as effective in saving lives as it claims
Oh I'm sure it's not. But the officials can say, "Look -- we're doing something about this problem." It's just like Cloud Outsourcing -- you're outsourcing the kids data AND the adults responsibility. It's a firewall against a lawsuit if (WHEN) something happens since "it's not my job, I successfully fostered it off to THEM". If things went wrong then it's THEIR fault, not mine.
"But Just Think of the Children," I hear people occasionally cry. "I Do, Most of of the Time," say the child molesters. I
Prison slaves. (Score:2)
Well, we still treat kids like slaves.
So no surprise the same psychopaths make their places of gathering a prison.
So they don't even tell the children... (Score:2)
While Gaggle claims that its tool promotes a sense of "digital citizenship," BuzzFeed News says the newly revealed documents show that students often don't understand that their work and communications are being surveilled until they violate the rules.
So, on top of everything, they don't inform the students about it. Time to put some pressure on the schools implementing this, parents. In Finland a system like this would NEVER get off the ground.
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In the EU, this would likely result in criminal charges under the DSGVO if the ones supervised had not been informed.
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Congrats mr superiority. This is not the EU.
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You think giving information on how things are done in other places is claiming "superiority"? Talk about arrogance and unwillingness to learn....
I work K-12... (Score:2)
And this is the norm for K-12. We need tools like this. Because, once you give every kid in the school a digital communications device (aka Chromebook, laptop, or iPad), they do things like this. What's a school to do when they are so worried about liability? Monitor. Monitor the hell out of communications, to avoid the lawsuits that may otherwise follow.
Just this week, it was reported to me that a 12-year-old girl in our school was sending harassing emails to a boy in her class. It started out with t
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Sorry, but you are doing so much more damage than you are preventing. Think fascism is a good idea? Think again.
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Part of my $dayjob is to support K-12 state-wide in certain technology areas. What you say is certainly the case for what the business is advocating for in our environment - tools for monitoring student computer use, content, creation, and communication - all with a heavy emphasis on self-harm detection. Including filtering and full browsing inspection on 1:1 take home devices when offnet. Some districts have implemented tools similar to, and including Gaggle with results where they have intervened and link
SO DON'T GIVE THEM EMAIL, DIPSHIT!!!!! (Score:1)
SO DON'T GIVE THEM EMAIL, DIPSHIT!!!!!
Why do you think Homeschoolers will fight to the death [hello 2nd Amendment & RKBA] in order to keep their children the hell outta the systematized TORTURE which you monsters inflict upon these poor kids for 13 [or more] years?
Yes, you're a monster.
As is anyone who cashes a check written by the Edumakashun Industrial Complex.
Extremist PR is working (Score:2)
From the article & comments here, it sounds like the aggressive & persistent PR campaigns against public education in the USA, in effect since "A Nation at Risk" was published during the Reagan regime, are working.
If we control for poverty, the USA has one of the best performing public education systems in the world. The problem is that everyone is told that it's "broken" & harmful, etc. & that it isn't curing the nation's society-wide ills, e.g. schools aren't curing mental illness, prevent
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The Cybersecurity Talk (Score:2)
What about the REAL threat? (Score:1)
Why aren't we concerned about those two companies' reach?
Seems like they know even more about each user...
What? How do people allowing their kids to make this mistake retain parental privileges?!
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Why aren't we concerned about those two companies' reach?
Seems like they know even more about each user...
Agreed.
What? How do people allowing their kids to make this mistake retain parental privileges?!
"Linked to" does not only mean identifying accounts that used a school email account to register for the service.
It also can mean, Sally Student logged into their personal FB account (registered to a personal email account) while logged onto a school device with her school credentials. When doing full content inspection (like Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly, LightSpeed, and others), these kinds of correlations are not just possible, but are being made and reported on to the school. If you're concerned ab
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So, if a kid is using Google G Suite on her iPad, and the school insists on us installing Gaggle as well, Gaggle will want to access the e-mail account registered in her Mail App (and refuse to work without such)?
Our school hasn't asked for anything like this, so it is of theoretical interest for now...
about study (Score:1)