US Schools Deploy AI Surveillance Amid Security Lapses, Privacy Concerns (apnews.com) 47
Schools across the United States are increasingly using artificial intelligence to monitor students' online activities, raising significant privacy concerns after Vancouver Public Schools inadvertently released nearly 3,500 unredacted, sensitive student documents to reporters.
The surveillance software, developed by companies like Gaggle Safety Management, scans school-issued devices 24/7 for signs of bullying, self-harm, or violence, alerting staff when potential issues are detected. Approximately 1,500 school districts nationwide use Gaggle's technology to track six million students, with Vancouver schools paying $328,036 for three years of service.
While school officials maintain the technology has helped counselors intervene with at-risk students, documents revealed LGBTQ+ students were potentially outed to administrators through the monitoring.
The surveillance software, developed by companies like Gaggle Safety Management, scans school-issued devices 24/7 for signs of bullying, self-harm, or violence, alerting staff when potential issues are detected. Approximately 1,500 school districts nationwide use Gaggle's technology to track six million students, with Vancouver schools paying $328,036 for three years of service.
While school officials maintain the technology has helped counselors intervene with at-risk students, documents revealed LGBTQ+ students were potentially outed to administrators through the monitoring.
Broken windows policing (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in the real world it was used to over police minority communities resulting in tons and tons of minority people locked up for minor crimes which of course devastated their communities creating a cycle of poverty. This was not an accident.
This kind of surveillance is the same thing just done by machines instead of people. Somehow whenever we see these they are always directed at vulnerable minorities and never had say the rich kids.
For you libertarian types who are getting a little triggered right now just think of this as security theater. It's the same basic thing.
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Well, the law-and-order idiots soooo love their surveillance and soo love to be "tough on crime" (unless the criminal is their presitent, for example).
Obviously, all these cretins do is make the world a worse place. The road to hell and all that.
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Tribalism groupthink competes with power + greed to screw up the world.
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Indeed. Too many greedy assholes and too many arrogant morons. On all levels.
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Humans Suck! Can we reboot humanity? Or will they do it themselves with pollution, AI, and/or nukes?
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Tribalism groupthink competes with power + greed to screw up the world.
Tribalism groupthink colludes with power + greed to screw up the world. FTFY.
As far as I can tell, that collusion is what is currently transforming the United States into a Fascist dictatorship. And the lower echelons of the groupthinkers are the ones getting it up the ass first. FAFO, as the increasingly popular saying goes.
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Tribalism groupthink colludes with power + greed to screw up the world. FTFY.
As far as I can tell, that collusion is what is currently transforming the United States into a Fascist dictatorship. And the lower echelons of the groupthinkers are the ones getting it up the ass first. FAFO, as the increasingly popular saying goes.
Looks very much like it, yes. The lower echolons of the failures at thinking (as they probably should be called) will take some time to be willing to accept what is going on though, as Fox News and others tell them everything is going just great. Obviously, they will search for somebody else to blame for their mistakes next.
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The lower echolons of the failures at thinking (as they probably should be called) will take some time to be willing to accept what is going on though, as Fox News and others tell them everything is going just great.
I would have thought so too; and while I'd say it's largely true, there are a few surprising departures. I "watch" a bit of Fox by proxy, via some of the left-leaning commenters I casually follow on YouTube. There have been several occasions now where major Fox spokescreatures have called out the Republican government, and even Trump himself, on some of the shit they're pulling.
I think they're doing it partly because they're low enough on the economic totem pole to be hurt a bit by the coming recession, and
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Interesting. That could mean the whole charade Trump, Musk and others are running could collapse even earlier than I expected. I did expect they would make it at least through their first year, but maybe not.
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There will be an emergency, perhaps a terrorist attack to blame on Canada, to rally the country around Trump.
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This kind of surveillance is the same thing just done by machines instead of people.
Nah. They are JUST trying to keep kids safe online.
Which seems like an impossible feat; which is likely why they had to resort to such strong measures. The schools really should just ban on all social media and student to student communications on school-owned devices; other than potentially a School-issued email account which would have all the automated monitoring going on.
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This kind of surveillance is the same thing just done by machines instead of people.
Nah. They are JUST trying to keep kids safe online.
Which seems like an impossible feat; which is likely why they had to resort to such strong measures. The schools really should just ban on all social media and student to student communications on school-owned devices; other than potentially a School-issued email account which would have all the automated monitoring going on.
Many schools do. But the kind of monitoring being mentioned here is not limited to social media, nor do students only post these kinds of messages on social media.
This is not so much about trying to keep children safe online, it is about trying to keep children safe after discovering they are posting certain kinds of messages online. For example, if a student writes something into a Google Doc which suggests an attempt at self-harm, the monitoring program would (hopefully) flag that and send an automated re
Oh, I know exactly what it's for (Score:2)
That's why I call it broken windows policing. Actually technically this is a little bit worse because you don't always even have the minor infractions a lot of times you've got a kid doing absolutely nothing wrong he's just a bit nerdy or God help him or her LGBTQ+.
The goal here isn't to help the kid in question it's to protect the school without having to actually address the underlining problems.
As an added bonus you get t
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This kind of surveillance is the same thing just done by machines instead of people. Somehow whenever we see these they are always directed at vulnerable minorities and never had say the rich kids. For you libertarian types who are getting a little triggered right now just think of this as security theater. It's the same basic thing.
As someone who works in education and has experience with these kinds of programs, I can tell you that your comment here doesn't really make any sense.
Part of it is the fault of the summary (and article), which makes it appear as if the monitoring program was the problem/issue as to how reporters got sensitive student information. However, when you read closer, the problem was human error, not machine. A human, somewhere along the line, made those records available and did so without taking proper precautio
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Ok. But the only reason they COULD make the info available was because it was collected and stored.
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Ok. But the only reason they COULD make the info available was because it was collected and stored.
It was ALREADY being collected and stored. You write into a Google Doc, it is collected and stored. Send an email, it is collected and stored. Do a web search, it is collected and stored. Visit a website, it is collected and stored. This is just basic understanding of how the Internet works these days.
The difference here is that the monitoring program scans the documents which are being collected and stored and is creating alerts based on the data which has already been collected and stored. When it scans a
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So I don't use Google Doc.
That SOMEBODY is collecting everything put out over the internet is an unfortunate truth, but schools shouldn't. Most of the one's I've known don't have the expertise to keep the data safe even if they wanted to, and they often don't really care. (And it you delegate the responsibility to someone else, it's STILL your responsibility.)
So I think you should find a new line of work (Score:2)
You fundamentally misunderstood my comment.
The problem is is when you go looking for problems you're going to find them with the kids you don't like. Which I assure you those kids exist.
I'm a nerd. Pretty big one. I got the shit bullied out of me and teachers mostly look the other way. Right up until the shooting started. I was out of school by then but when there's all these school shootings all of a sudden teachers cared about bully
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Schools should not be going over student's social media posts. You fundamentally misunderstood my comment.
No, I understood your comment. Your comment was based on a complete misunderstanding of what this type of monitoring software does. Your comment made absolutely no sense in the context of the software being discussed.
No one was "looking" for problems. The software automatically detects certain kinds of words/phrases and then sends reports to designated employees based on that, which are then reviewed. This is not schools "going over student's social media posts".
The problem here is you were speaking ignora
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There's a concept called broken windows policing. In theory the idea is that if you heavily enforce minor infractions people will become so magically law-abiding that crime goes away.
You are intentionally misrepresenting Broken Windows theory [urbanpolicy.net]. The theory is that if it is seen that minor infractions are permitted, consequence will be increased incidence of major infractions. This theory is supported in cited literature and was well-researched subject with clear pro and against sides.
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More police around means more likelihood of having an interaction with the police. More interactions means higher likelihood of a negative interaction. Negative interaction means being detained or going to jail over something as minor as nonviolent drug use, jay walking, walking while black, etc. That means loss of job, loss of housing, loss of custody of kids, depression, more crime, more drug use etc. This all disproportionately falls on the shoulders of people of color because crime follows poverty,
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The "Peter Principle" was fpund in education (Score:4, Insightful)
Not all educators are morons, but those a bit higher up tend to be.
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It's a low-competition power structure for losers to climb. They know they can't cut it as a psychopath CEO but they can basically pay Kaplin for a EdD doctorate for like 30k and be top dog. Total diploma mill cost to climb the ladder in ed, is like 50k or so from start to finish.
I remember when the 2nd or 3rd highest paid dude in my district used to spend lunch hour policing the halls for exposed bra straps and he also was one of those guys who thought being in the 30% tax bracket meant he paid 30% of h
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It's a low-competition power structure for losers to climb.
It is anti-meritocratic power structure for social climbers, a consequence of DEI and its precursors. Lack of merit and belief in critical theory (that states there is only subjective truth) is how you end up with alternative math, self-esteem and other bogus teaching practices.
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Oh Christ shut up
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Not really. The Peter Principle applies to all hierachical organizations unless specific countermeasures are in place. My comment is just that education typically has such hierachical structures.
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Not all educators are morons, but those a bit higher up tend to be.
No, the percentage of morons who are educators is not significantly higher as one works their way up the administration levels. It is probably just more noticeable. I say this as an educator with many, many years of experience.
However, thinking this problem is limited to education is where people go wrong. There are just a lot of morons everywhere.
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Ok, read your sencence again and then think about how you can justify that "no". Here is a hint: I did not even imply other hierachical organizations had fewer morons in their upper echolons. In fact, I did not make any comparison at all.
That the Peter Principle was found in educational hierachies in no way means it is limited to those. It pretty much applies to every hierachy that does not have specific countermeasures, meaning to most of them.
Privacy and data collection of under 13 year olds (Score:2)
There is a US federal law covering data collection of persons under 13 years of age. It requires full parental consent to collect and profile the child's data.
Somehow, there needs to be a prohibition on "use profiling data to build a anonymized general LLM model" of such data.
Google's YouTube paid a $170 million fine for doing this. https://www.ftc.gov/news-event... [ftc.gov]
Google and YouTube Will Pay Record $170 Million for Alleged Violations of Children’s Privacy Law
FTC, New York Attorney General allege You
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There is a US federal law covering data collection of persons under 13 years of age.
I believe US schools are exempted from this due to In loco parentis. And the parents signing off on it. The School assumes parental rights over the child while the child is utilizing a school-issued device; which allows them to collect and use data for the purposes of security health and safety.
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Pathetic. (Score:2)
"Should we actually pay attention to the kids and take an interest in their welfare?"
Nah, lets just put some spy robots in the place and call it good.
I swear, there is no lengths to which a time-serving bureaucrat won't go to avoid doing their job.
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You mean like this one [cnn.com]?
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"Should we actually pay attention to the kids and take an interest in their welfare?" Nah, lets just put some spy robots in the place and call it good.
I swear, there is no lengths to which a time-serving bureaucrat won't go to avoid doing their job.
As someone who works in education and has experience with these types of programs, I can tell you that your comment comes across as woefully ignorant. These programs monitor online documents, web searches, emails, etc. and do so at 10:00 in the morning, as well as 10:00 at night (and every second in between).
If you think a program which monitors what children put onto public facing websites is a "spy robot", what would you call government employees hanging out in your child's room at 10:00 at night to make
schools need an 8 foot high chain link (Score:2)
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fence around the perimeter of their property with sensors that can detect when someone climbs on it, then when all the kids are in class close and lock the gate, and if anybody tries to climb over the fence armed secuiry can deal with it
Armed security? Just electrify the fence. Or put shock collars on students that set off the charge when they try to cross the perimeter. Whatever you do, you don't want to waste manpower on watching students. That's the whole point of this tech. Avoid giving kids attention at all costs. Gotta keep it purely tech-driven.
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the idea is to protect the students from shooters, make it almost impossible to gain access to the school
Funny, seems like most of what I hear about modern schools is trying to make sure the students behave and stay put. This AI surveillance story certainly isn't about preventing shooters that aren't already students from getting into the school. This is surveilling the students themselves.
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They have that fence at Mission Hill school in Santa Cruz, except it's there to keep the kids in, so they don't run into traffic on Mission st (aka CA HWY 1.)
They call it Prison Hill. (It's nowhere near the Mission and it's not on a hill, BTW.)
What we need is to stop glorifying violence and allowing people who have proven that they cannot handle having guns to have them. Most school shooters would have been disarmed under reasonable gun control laws, which would still permit most citizens to own them.
Money back guarantee? (Score:2)
I think the point was missed (Score:2)
Being a teenager can suck, you have plenty of questions, you don't want to trust anyone, and the information you're fed, is generally, terrible. You're told to ask questions, but, by grade 2 or 3, you're educated enough to know the only questions you can ask, are the ones the teachers want you to ask. You're also educated enough