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Education Privacy

Will Schools Turn to Surveillance Tech to Prevent Covid-19 Spread? (wired.com) 69

An anonymous reader quotes Wired: When students return to school in New Albany, Ohio, in August, they'll be carefully watched as they wander through red-brick buildings and across well-kept lawns — and not only by teachers. The school district, with five schools and 4,800 students, plans to test a system that would require each student to wear an electronic beacon to track their location to within a few feet throughout the day. It will record where students sit in each classroom, show who they meet and talk to, and reveal how they gather in groups. The hope is such technology could prevent or minimize an outbreak of Covid-19, the deadly respiratory disease at the center of a global pandemic...

Many schools and colleges plan to proceed gradually and carefully, while keeping kids spread out as much as possible. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines for reopening schools recommend staggered schedules that allow for smaller classes, opening windows to provide more air circulation, avoiding sharing books and computers, regular cleaning of buses and classes, and requiring masks and handwashing. Many see some form of distance learning continuing through next year. A handful also are considering deploying technology to help...

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers says she isn't aware of other schools looking to adopt detailed surveillance measures. But the AFT has issued guidelines on reopening schools and colleges that warns about vendors potentially using the crisis to expand data-mining practices. A small but growing surveillance industry has sprung up around Covid already, with firms pitching everything from temperature-tracking infrared cameras and contact tracing apps to wireless beacons and smart cameras to help enforce social distancing at work. "It's been one of the most disturbing parts of this," says Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

Now, Cahn says, this cottage industry is keen to find a way into classrooms. "One of the things that will be a huge profit driver, potentially, is that younger children would need specially designed devices if they don't have smartphones," he says.

An official at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education also told Wired that some state universities are "exploring" the use of people-tracking Bluetooth beacons.
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Will Schools Turn to Surveillance Tech to Prevent Covid-19 Spread?

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  • What is the damage level a directional HERF device needs to beam at to damage a bluetooth reciever?

  • The manager class comes up with these crazy facist solutions because they are not leaders and too incompetent to implement basic face mask and actual testing/stay at home quarantine.
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      these crazy facist solutions

      Down with facism! No face is superior to another! Smirking lives matter!

  • by BringsApples ( 3418089 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @12:45PM (#60156582)

    None of this will help COVID-19 spreading, it'll just watch it. Isolation is the only way to stop the spread. Don't spend the money on survelience technology, just kick it at the house.

    • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      I don't yet believe in the isolation idea. While the correlation seems natural, correlation is not causation.

      All of the hardest hit regions also had very tough lockdowns to the point you could call the quarantines. And yet the death rates in those regions are sky high.

      Now sure, the explanation for that might be that the hardest hit regions all had bad air pollution and THAT made people drop like flys under covid, which in turn provoked a stronger lockdown.

      None the less, I am not yet convinced that the lockd

      • Wyoming didn't need a strict lockdown because when your closest neighbor is four miles away "social distancing" is kinda redundant. With population density 500,000% higher, New York City obviously has more to worry about from human-to-human transmission.

        Places that had a bigger problem, or expect to have a bigger population due to population density etc should and did take stronger preventative measures. I don't think you need to randomly try to mix aur pollution into that.

        > Also Germany's basic reprod

        • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

          I'm saying whoever calculates these reproduction numbers is as full of shit as people calculating mortality rates from tested infected numbers and/or death with/of covids...

          In some studies they said households with more people in them had actually fewer infections (presumably because more people in the household implies children who are said not to transmit well).

          Then you have places like New York and northern Italy, who basically had quarantines where covid ran through like a wildfire anyway.

          This points, i

          • > This points, in my eyes, to people being less resilient in areas with high air pollution

            I think, though I can't prove it of course, that ignoring obvious factors like a 500,000% higher rate of person-to-person contact and instead randomly reaching for something that isn't supported by any study is - strange. Kinda Trumpian, actually. :)

          • I think it plausible, though I can not prove it of course, that the best thing would have been to send these people camping in the woods, have a big kumbaya and wait for the whole thing to blow over :D.

            Didn't you originally say that you thought that the lockdowns were not providing any benefits and now you are saying that the best thing would be to isolate in the woods. What is the difference?

    • we can't isolate forever. We're a social species. At some point people who aren't introverts and nerds are going to demand to be around people again. Moreover America isn't going to pay for everyone to isolate. We're going to have to get the economy going at some point because we're not going to do a broad UBI needed to maintain a functioning society during that level of isolation.
      • We're going to have to get the economy going at some point because we're not going to do a broad UBI needed to maintain a functioning society during that level of isolation.

        The only way you can support a UBI or any kind of extensive social safety net is with a robust economy. If everyone is sitting around at home isolated, who the hell is actually producing any of the things that people still need to buy?

        The government can't just keep cutting everyone $1,200 checks without the currency inflating and becoming worthless as we've seen in so many [cnbc.com] other countries [cnn.com] that thought printing more money would just solve all of their problems.

        • The article here was about students being tracked with beacons. I'm saying, "kick it at the house" aka virtual school. But alas it's slashdot, so context is replaced and the strawmen are born.

          • The problem there is, if the kids need to stay home then so do the parents or at least a caregiver. That complicates the situation somewhat.

            • if the kids need to stay home then so do the parents or at least a caregiver

              Spoken by someone who is a member of the privileged class. In previous generations, that caregiver was a grandma. COVID's coming for them now. Or the caregiver was an older sister. We're not producing as many big sisters as we used to as family sizes shrink and women seek further opportunities. And they won't stay home, nor will most men. It requires lots of cash to live in a big home with a two-car garage and replace your smartphone and visit Disney.XXX every few years. Among the economically distressed, k

      • "Viruses don't respect borders!" Meanwhile the countries with strict borders like Korea and Taiwan didn't have a problem with the virus. Moreover they tracked down everyone who did have it and put them into quarantine (which is a border).
    • The university I work at has to allow students onto campus either for research in a lab (grad student) or for lab/clinical courses (undergrad). However, the way they are monitoring numbers is free and largely anonymous. They just monitor the number of devices connected to the wireless access points dotted all over campus. If there are large clusters then they know that they need to do something to reduce numbers there.

      This is free, does not require people to be tagged like livestock and anonymous since t
    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      Don't spend the money on surveillance technology, just kick it at the house.

      That is the least feasible solution of them all. The e-learning for K-12 has not been working at all. From personal experience and from friends who are either parents or teachers, the kids are getting a severely reduced level of education at home. And I'm fighting a potentially losing battle keeping my boss from making me fire one of my employees with two young children whose velocity of work has been almost cut in half. My kindergarten (now 1st grade I guess) daughter who likely has ADHD has shown no capab

    • ...Don't spend the money on survelience technology, just kick it at the house.

      There is something you don't know, schools already have a ton of camera's in them. The school district I work at has already been in the process of upgrading there old cameras to 4K cameras, and increasing the total number. The high schools have over 100 4K cameras each. The system also comes with facial recognition and tracking abilities, you can pick a person and the system will follow them across every camera automatically until you turn it off. The pandemic has nothing to do with this, it was already i

      • There is something you don't know...

        Famous Slashdot mentality, thanks. I'll go crawl back into my cardboard box in the rain now and count my poopies.

  • the generals(in this case educators) are usually fighting the last war.

    Just my 2 cents ;)
  • Got gotta em used to a total surveillance police state while they're still young and normalize it for them so they don't even know to complain when older and this level of overwhelming pervasive government spying 1984 style intrusion is simply an accepted normal part of their lives.

    The future of freedom is doomed if this becomes the norm.
  • by Kohath ( 38547 )

    It will take them too long. By the time they get the tech sorted out many people will be vaccinated.

  • by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @12:57PM (#60156640) Homepage Journal

    Setting politics aside and looking only at reality numbers and statistics for the moment.

    I notice that we've had massive demonstrations each weekend for the past two weekends. Pretty much all over the country people have been gathering to protest massive numbers. (Note: George Floyd died on May 25, about 14 days ago.) (I'm not saying "was killed" until after the trial, but yeah... it looks like he was killed.)

    The incubation to infection time for Covid is roughly 4 days. If Covid is still a problem, we would have seen a massive uptick in infections by now.

    Looking at official numbers [worldometers.info], tab down to the "daily new cases" chart below the state numbers and note that the new cases rate has not changed significantly in the last 2 weeks.

    The original purpose for the lockdown was to flatten the curve and give our health care system time to prepare. We've done that, and we've flattened the curve more than expected. And note I mean that in the literal sense: the original predictions had social distancing "built in", and we've exceeded that prediction by a wide margin. In the previous link, tab down to the "Total Coronavirus Cases in the US" chart and note that the line is linear, not exponential.

    A recent report on Covid mortality by Dr. Richard Cross notes:

    When it comes to the COVID-19 event, we have been experiencing a serious case of tunnel vision. As we focus on the day to day increase of COVID-19 things could look pretty grim, but as we take a step back and look at the comparative total mortality here in the US, things aren’t much worse than a bad seasonal flu, like that last seen in 2017-18. If you take the New York City region out of the mix, the rest of the country is cumulatively well within the expected mortality.

    So the overall mortality rate including COVID-19 is not much different from the expected mortality rate from the flu of two years ago.

    In light of all existing evidence, we don't need to do anything about COVID-19 except maybe in NYC.

    We should start easing off of the restrictions, not adding new ones.

    (And of course keep an eye on the numbers and be prepared to reinstate some restrictions if it looks like things are getting out of hand.)

    • Only problem is that the from what the health people have said about the riots and looting groups is that most of the people out there in the protests are young so would not be showing symptoms or issues. It will take another two-three weeks from now for the disease to spread and show up in the people that would need hospitalization.
      As some healthcare scientists have said if you were out in those groups you probably caught covid.
    • COVID is not done, but it has turned regional. Click on your link, start looking at the individual states. Some states like Pennsylvania are trending downward, but in other states like Texas or especially Utah, and maybe Florida, the trend is upward.

      Also, the incubation period is up to 14 days, with the median at 4-5 days.
    • So Looting helps to prevent COVID-19 transmission. That will be a great defense attorney position.
    • "I'm not saying "was killed" until after the trial"

      He was killed regardless of the outcome of any trial.

    • I'm not saying "was killed" until after the trial, but yeah... it looks like he was killed.

      I think you may be confused. Whether he was killed or not was already established with the coroner's final report: he was. Whether he was murdered or not is what the trial will determine.

      As a very general rule:
      Die: Cease living
      Kill: Cause the death of
      Murder: Kill with ill intent

      That rule misses a lot of caveats, particularly with regards to murder (e.g. felony murder, where applicable, generally needn't involve an intent to kill, though it does involve intent to commit a felony), but it gets at the biggest

  • by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @12:58PM (#60156644) Journal

    They certainly will say it's to fight covid and they'll certainly use and abuse it for other things.

  • by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @01:06PM (#60156670)

    They are not going to turn to surveillance to deal with Covid-19 spread.

    They are going to turn to surveillance because that is what you do as part of your "control" mentality in a police state. We decided a long time ago that people under the age of 18 do not have any constitutional protections... well we decided that for everyone anyways... but you know what I am saying here. Extra no rights for you as a kid is the order of the day here and conditioning people to accept a surveillance state is necessary to move to the next level. We just have to wait for most of the people that are alive and will not tolerate it to die first.

    One step at a time we will rob you of liberty and you will agree with it.
    One step at a time we will rob your child of liberty and you will agree with it.
    One step at a time we will rob your grandchildren of liberty and you will agree with it.
    One step at a time we will murder anyone that opposes us using "fear", "qualified immunity", "collateral damage", and "national security" excuses.

    Yours Truly,
    Government (the ultimate institution of man)

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You're forgetting one demographic that stands in the way of attempting to extend surveillance like this to adults: GenX'ers.

      Call us lazy, cynical, and selfish, but we grew up enjoying nearly unlimited freedom to do whatever the fuck we wanted to do while Mom & Dad were at work, mostly deflected attempts attempts by school authorities to rein us in as teens, and we'll be collectively DAMNED if we're going to start letting ANYONE do it to us as middle-aged adults.

      To authoritarians, GenX'ers are like a her

  • Authoritarian wet-dreams enabled by the fact that people are still panicking about this dumb-ass virus. Ask yourself this: in normal times, if some school administrators floated an idea like this, would parents say 'oh, okay, that's fine!'? Hell no they wouldn't, they'd threaten to sue the school district over it, keep their kids home, and it'd be all over the news. Meanwhile crap like this isn't going to stop any virus from spreading; the only way you're going to stop that is to just keep everyone completely isolated from everyone else, forever, which means the end of our civilization and probably our entire species. Ain't happenin'.

    * We will endure this 'social-distancing-face-mask-wearing' shit for right now
    * There will be a vaccine
    * Everyone will be required to get it if they want to attend school (anti-vaxxers are 'evolution in action' as always, if you know what I mean)
    * Things will go back to normal
    * Get a head start on things and STOP PANICKING, STARTING RIGHT NOW.
    (because it's clear that people who should be thinking are still panicking)
    ..or, I guess, you can just let our society, and the whole country, continue to fall into chaos and disorder and become irrelevant.
    Because guess what? Shit like this has happened before, and surprise, our species, and our country, survived it. Shit like this will happen again, and guess what? We'll survive it then, too. All the panicking, all the over-the-top draconian bullshit, none of that helps anything, really, except the power-hungry types who would like it if they could lock down everyone (except the 'ruling class', of course) to lives of just work, eat, sleep, repeat and otherwise Do As You Are Told without questioning anything, ever. That ain't gonna fly, not before, not now, not ever, not if you want a functioning, productive, mentally/emotionally healthy society, with productive, creative people in it, who are happy with their lives.

    Oh, I'm sorry Sally, you can't go out on an actual physical date with Bobby, he might be a carrier for the coronavirus, then you'd get sick and might die! You'll just have to have a Facetime date on your phones, okay? It's almost the same thing, it'll be fine!

    You really want to live in a world like that? I don't think so.

    • by DogDude ( 805747 )
      I agree with you except about the power grab stuff. I don't believe that's really a thing. Who cares if everybody is locked down or not? Who does that benefit? The people who want lock downs indefinitely are just really, really scared. They're irrationally panicked, is all. People who've never thought about The Big Picture are just not thinking about it for the first time, and they're pooping their pants. Completely understandable, but that's now how we should make decisions as a society.
      • "They're irrationally panicked, is all."

        Fear is a major component of how you institute tyranny.

        Fear of crime, fear of invasion, fear of boogeymen, fear of disease, and good old fashion fear of the unknown.

        Fear is the currency of tyranny and every politician will promise you protection in exchange for that currency. And when you have enough of that currency you can buy tyranny outright!

        "Completely understandable, but that's now how we should make decisions as a society."

        You can't tell that to society, espec

        • People in a constant state of fear essentially have their higher reasoning abilities shut off like literally flipping a switch to 'off', and then they operate almost entirely on hardwired instinct alone; anyone who seems authoritative enough to them that says "I can save you from this!" will get their attention and the average person will do as they are told by that person. That's how the 'tyranny' you speak of starts. Allow that person(s) to consolidate their power, their hold on a populace, and by the tim
      • I'm not saying there is a huge group of power-hungry types out there who want to lock down the whole country forever, but there are some, and they tend to have money, power, and influence already. What stops them is that what they would like to have happen is antithetical to what everyone else wants, which is freedom of movement. I guess what I'm saying is the power-hungry types are few and they're pathological in nature, but they do exist.
    • I'm totally against this type of tracking. I'm also very pro-vaccine. That said, I'm leary of any vaccine that gets rushed to production. There is a reason it takes years to develop a SAFE vaccine. That reason isn't because researchers are lazy or dumb.

      I'd be especially hesitant to give a "warp speed" developed vaccine to any female who ever plans on having children. That mistake has been done many times in the past with mixed results.

  • have a protest rally with your friends and toss out those beacons.

  • colleges better give refund with loan APR for people who say no to this.

  • "According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 80 percent of public schools—and more than 94 percent of high schools—in the U.S. used security cameras to monitor students during the 2015-2016 school year, nearly doubling the number of schools using cameras a decade earlier."

  • The Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear

  • Our schools are already really expensive and don't seem to be creating the educational results we want. The reasons for this are complex and highly political, but seem to boil down to more money going to administration and overhead instead of going to front line teachers and the tools they directly need to educate. Creating student tracking systems like this sounds expensive and there are many good arguments in the threads here questioning the actual health value and warning of the privacy implications. I w
    • I would imagine that what, 99% of all school age children in the US already have cell phones. And considering that there are only two platforms, it's trivial to just tell kids to install an "app" and use that for tracking and surveillance. Most "apps" already do that, so it can't be difficult to do. I would think that using phones for surveillance would be extremely inexpensive, in fact.
      • I would imagine that what, 99% of all school age children in the US already have cell phones. And considering that there are only two platforms, it's trivial to just tell kids to install an "app" and use that for tracking and surveillance. Most "apps" already do that, so it can't be difficult to do. I would think that using phones for surveillance would be extremely inexpensive, in fact.

        99%? No way. Hell, 64% of the public school families in my town are free or reduced cost lunches. If those families can't afford lunch, there's no way that most of those kids have smart phones, or home Internet, or a home computer.

        • by DogDude ( 805747 )
          Well, if that's the case, then it's still trivially cheap to give kids basic Google phones. I picked up an Android phone for $8 just a few weeks ago.
      • Just make them install novid, developed at an US university and don't even have to pay.

        Not that I think it helps, but at least it will give some students papers to write. The only app using ultrasonic time of flight, Bluetooth rssi has issues.

      • I think a lot of people have this warped vision of poor families being unable to go out and buy their kid a brand new iPhone or top-shelf Android phone with postpaid Verizon service, and extrapolate that to "poor kids don't have access to smartphones"

        What REALLY happens: poor parents, just like wealthier parents, have Android phones and iPhones, because non-Android/iPhone phones basically don't exist anymore (at least, unless you pay a PREMIUM to get something like a Jitterbug flip-phone), and mobile phone

    • From John Taylor Gatto pp 360-362: https://archive.org/details/Jo... [archive.org]

      ====
      Two Social Revolutions Become One

      Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest,
      not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is
      indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and
      content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one.
      The problem is

  • They will turn to COVID-19 as an excuse to enable surveillance.

  • Read what an expert says:

    https://www.schneier.com/blog/... [schneier.com]

  • I call "bullshit" on the author's assertion that "younger children would need specially designed devices if they don't have smartphones". "Smartphones" aren't expensive anymore, especially if they don't need actual phone service & only use wifi... and I GUARANTEE that ANY purpose-built device, regardless of how limited its functionality was, would end up costing hundreds of dollars per device more than a random low-end new Android device from China.

    Within 5 minutes, you can LITERALLY find hundreds of po

  • After massive crowds have been gathered for rioting over the last week, what is the point of social distancing now?

  • The headline question is worded wrong. The correct wording is, "Will schools be able to use preventing the spread of Covid-19 as an excuse to implement surveillance techniques?"
  • Sure. Kids aren't people, they're little animals to train to do tricks or get punished. That's why skool sux

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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