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.
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.
Damage Level (Score:1)
What is the damage level a directional HERF device needs to beam at to damage a bluetooth reciever?
Just have testing and facemasks (Score:1)
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these crazy facist solutions
Down with facism! No face is superior to another! Smirking lives matter!
just, no. (Score:3)
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.
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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
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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
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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
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> 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. :)
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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?
Contact Tracing works (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Free, anonymous monitoring (Score:2)
This is free, does not require people to be tagged like livestock and anonymous since t
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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
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...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
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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.
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Re: Covid-19 isn't a risk for kids (Score:2)
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That's crap. I know a guy in his 20s who got taken down for several weeks and he said it was pretty brutal. Don't say "affects" when you mean kills. COVID-19 is less likely to kill people under 50, but it does on occasion put them in the hospital. We are also getting reports that some who lost their sense of taste and small still haven't gotten it back. [usnews.com]
They better! WTF? why shouldn't they? (Score:2)
1) Kids are the bats of mankind... disease vectors. Teachers are at risk but this whole time hardly anybody cared about the risk to teachers (in the USA where we don't value teachers... don't expect realizations to last long.)
2) At risk parents exist who are under 50; many high school kids have parents over 50.
3) The disease is mutating the most people who catch it and it impacts the WHOLE body unlike many viruses and that is why there are people losing their sense of smell from weeks to months to maybe for
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There was a time that we believed young adults were subject to most things. However, a few dumb kids went and got meningitis, the bulldozer parents blamed the schools instead of themselves for raising dumb kids, and now everyone under 30 who goes to university has to have a meningitis shot. This is not just because we don't believe in the Darwin Principle, it is also because it costs money to treat these idiots, money that the schools and state do not have. It
I recall a saying, something like (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
Next gen sheep training (Score:1)
The future of freedom is doomed if this becomes the norm.
No (Score:2)
It will take them too long. By the time they get the tech sorted out many people will be vaccinated.
Covid is done, we don't need anything (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
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As some healthcare scientists have said if you were out in those groups you probably caught covid.
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Also, the incubation period is up to 14 days, with the median at 4-5 days.
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"I'm not saying "was killed" until after the trial"
He was killed regardless of the outcome of any trial.
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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
What is without a doubt: (Score:3)
They certainly will say it's to fight covid and they'll certainly use and abuse it for other things.
Of course not! (Score:3)
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)
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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
This couldn't POSSBILY be abused, oh no! (Score:3)
* 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)
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.
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"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
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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.
excellent for young protesters (Score:2)
have a protest rally with your friends and toss out those beacons.
colleges better give refund with loan APR for peop (Score:2)
colleges better give refund with loan APR for people who say no to this.
A bit late don't you think? (Score:2)
"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 they made the Jews wear (Score:2)
The Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear
Use of education dollars (Score:2)
Not expensive at all (Score:1)
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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.
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Re: Not expensive at all (Score:2)
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.
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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
Schools create the results *some* people want (Score:2)
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
No. (Score:2)
They will turn to COVID-19 as an excuse to enable surveillance.
contact tracing apps do not work (Score:1)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/... [schneier.com]
no, they don't need "specially designed devices" (Score:2)
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
Why is this still a thing (Score:2)
After massive crowds have been gathered for rioting over the last week, what is the point of social distancing now?
Headline question is worded wrong (Score:2)
Of course they will (Score:2)