No school Foster Gloucester!
Scott Contreras-Koterbay, Ph.D.
Department of Art & Design/Department of Philosophy
East Tennessee State University
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Bread and Milk! BREAD and MILK! Stop & Shop MOBBED!
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I don’t believe anyone had brought up the question of warrantless surveillance yet. Guess I will, then. Rather off the cuff because it’s hot and I’m sweaty and don’t feel like doing too much research.
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Equal access to education is a federally guaranteed right in the US. If chromebook-like devices are now deemed a prerequisite to being provided an education, the school system must ensure all students have access to such a device. The financial or technological capability of a given student to opt out of using the school-provided device is immaterial to the discussion, since there will always be a subset of students who don’t have that option.
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For the subset of families who must allow the devices in their home, all the residents of that household are now subject to, in varying degrees, being recorded by the device. How exactly does this not constitute warrantless surveillance by a government agency? Not just of the student (who may or may not have waived their 4th amendment rights, that’s a whole 'nother discussion) but of all the other persons in the household, including ones who most certainly were not parties to any such legal agreement? Houseguests, adult siblings, grandparents…
Now, let’s pick up the tangent of child pornography again, because the threshold for violating that set of laws is extremely low, the punishments are extremely high.
I started out by saying that it’s hot and I’m sweaty. I’m currently sitting in front of my computer in my underwear. As far as I know, my webcam is off, but I only even considered the possibility of it not being off because I was primed to do so by the topic of discussion. I’m absolutely certain that I’ve done homework in high school in similar states of undress. I also know that people are terrible at keeping track of multiple things at once, and become habituated and blind to persistent objects in their familiar surroundings. The idea that a student will constantly remember, across multiple years, that the camera might be on and that they must put away the laptop before getting changed is beyond nonsensical. It goes against the findings of hundreds of studies in fundamental human psychology.
But let’s allow for the moment that Rhode Island is filled with just such students. Presumably none of them have toddler-aged siblings who run through the house naked after a bath. Because let me assure you, all toddlers who have the ability to run, do run around naked after a bath. If the webcam happens to include the doorway in its view area, congratulations! The school administrators are now storing child pornography. But also, depending on how exactly the prosecutor chooses to interpret the situation, the student who is using the device, the school administrators, or both, are responsible for producing child pornography.
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I think it’s stupid, and this is a direct violation of human rights to personal life.
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Well those lawyers, spies, criminals, and government employees are all totally inept idiots. I have a work laptop and a personal PC, and I have absolutely no trouble whatsoever telling which I’m using. I must be the ‘no one’ who can tell the difference. And I would say that anyone in that situation who just randomly does whatever on whichever computer they happen to see at the time deserves what they get.
But this isn’t about that. It’s about kids using computers issued by the school, apparently with the consent to use it for personal purposes. That is very good, especially for students who might not have a separate personal computer available. But there should be separate accounts - one for schoolwork and one for personal stuff. (My chromebook has an account for each family member, so any of us can pick it up and use it without accidentally seeing each other’s email or browser history - this is totally doable.) It should be made clear that schoolwork account may be monitored, but personal account is private. And that should be enforced - the schools shouldn’t be able to spy on a system when it’s not in schoolwork mode.
That said, even when it’s in schoolwork mode, any access to surveillance (cameras, microphones, keystroke loggers) should popup a dialog whereby the student must agree to allow the surveillance. That sort of thing may be reasonable when, for example, taking a standardized test, so it should be possible, but it should not be covert. Of course, the school should still be able to remotely access the system to do tech support, but again, that should have reasonable limits and require acceptance if not initiated by the student.
These things are not complicated or difficult. The software already supports it. It’s entirely about policies, procedures, people, and politics. All those P-factors are always the most difficult parts of technology and progress.
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It’s all good until somebody pokes an eye out.
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Not so much a slope as a precipitous drop.
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The ipad is required by the school? Who pays for it?
There were lots of things that the school “required” of my son, including a SS number. The school didn’t get any of them.
There isn’t and virtually can’t be a turnkey mechanism for the sort of security this requires. If you had properly trained people, yes. Easy. You could make sure that only authorized people could spy on children (which is better I guess but…). But without rigid discipline and a lot of money and time spent on tedious security procedures… no chance. Whatever is captured is going to end up on the Internet eventually.
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Both I and my wife maintain separate systems for work and personal use. her work laptop is owned by the hospital and has hospital-installed software on there. The email account on that computer is her work account, and is only used for business purposes. She has no trouble keeping work and personal separate, because the rules say that she is not allowed to install any software on her work computer. So she does not.
I actually use two systems at work. One is DOD, and one is company. Once again, I am not allowed to install anything on those systems, unless asked to do so by the company. I cannot access my personal email on work systems. I have a personal laptop that I can do whatever on.
I can’t see how either of us are going to be able to accidentally contaminate one system with the other. I could set up the work computer with my personal email or browser, but that would involve deliberately overriding firewalls and breaking rules. Which would put my job and security at risk.
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I am allowed to install whatever I want and use my work computer for personal stuff, but I’d rather not. The one time that I did, while traveling, I set up a virtual machine for personal stuff and deleted it when I got home. Even if it’s allowed, I just don’t want cross-contamination or the problems that it causes. (Not least of which is that I don’t want to be bothered by work stuff like emails or messages when I’m not working.)
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I am sure it depends on what you do, and who you work for. And I am not at all advocating schools or businesses being able to spy on anyone. I was just responding to the idea that it is difficult or impossible to keep separate personal and professional systems. Virtually everyone I know seems to manage doing so with minimal difficulty. It is annoying to have to use so many devices, but that is the cost of security.
I also think a lot of the rhetoric about classified systems is coming from people who do not understand how those systems work.
All that being noted, if I thought that anyone felt that they had the right to monitor my kids at home through their electronic devices, there would absolutely be hell to pay. Which is completely different from some hospital IT person or administrator being able to look through my wife’s work emails or charting. Those are work products, and belong to them. Remotely turning on a laptop camera to try to peek at naked kids is not a function of work or school. And no matter what the initial intentions of installing such abilities, there is a 100% chance that someone is going to figure out how to use them for sexual gratification. Just like those “posture studies” images.
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I wonder how secure their channels back to the mothership are, and do they sanitize their inputs?
Little Bobby Droptables…
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The administrators in your school district intend to issue a device your children. I have been teaching for twenty years, am active in technology adoption in my district, and have worked with teachers from all over America at elite academic camps during the summer. Every teacher I’ve talked to said their district issues devices as students enter high school, or are the district is working toward that goal.
District administrators aren’t dumb or evil. They all hate actual textbooks. Its a hassle because of the cost, storage and replacement. Students prefer actual textbooks to online textbook access, but the administrators will implement online textbooks anyway. When a student has is issued a district-supplied device, the administrators recieve ability and temptation to spy. And it starts with a troublesome student. For some administrators, it will be irresistible.
Many studies and surveys show that students perform better with a real textbook. You need to contact a school board member to make this point. They may go online, but fight the district-issued equipment.
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We pay for it. Next year in year ten he needs a laptop instead. This is in Australia. Different system from the US.
I detect the hand of commerce here.
Our local school was conned - the only proper word - into a scheme in which pupils were supplied with iPads that their parents had to pay for. Look! No cost to the school…
Except that wifi collapsed the day the first class deployed. How much do you think that cost to upgrade?
And then pupils discovered they could cast to the projectors and porn started to appear over teachers’ heads. It’s going to cost to fix the security on the projectors…
And finally - the discovery that iPads are useless for education; they are a poor substitute for paper books (can’t even emulate an open exercise book, a proper dictionary and a textbook) and they cannot be typed on at useful speeds without predictive text, which negates half the point of language learning.
And iPads are fragile. (Much more so than Chromebooks).
So - large hidden infrastructure costs, unhappy parents, but a salesman got bonus.
I’ve been in the business a fair amount of time - I had my first microprocessor-equipped device in 1976 and I got into serious computing through needing to analyse ultrasonic signals back in around 1980, since when I’ve been involved on and off with scientific and business computing. And I think schools have lost the plot. I do wonder the extent to which the spying on children is seen as yet another way of justifying the IT budget. But having read the posts above from @quorihunter I am appalled at the way that someone who seems to be a US citizen is accepting a system which people in the actual Soviet Union saw as one of the worst downsides of their society.
In this country there’s an association of schools for girls - both State and private - and they recently had a conference at which the head told everybody that they did not need to worry about girls, fears of things like sexting were actually overblown and their daughters were generally capable of taking care of themselves. I think it’s an important message. I have three daughters and I have never censored what any of them read or looked at. They seem to be doing OK. I think it’s time to push back extremely hard against the surveillance state, because all it does is put power in the hands of authoritarians.
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When I started college, I was given a list of supplies I needed to purchase before day one: books, design tools, art supplies. It all came out to around $800 in mid-90s money, I only made use of about half of it, and the only things I was able to resell afterwards were the books (for about 10% of what I paid).
An iPad holds its value very well, is the definition of a multi-use tool, and is a decent investment. Times change and so does technology for students.
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When i was going to community college i was a good student and bought all the required books and supplies. After the 2nd semester i stopped, i would only buy what i needed only if the teacher threatened the class with the “if i don’t see you with the book during X class/test then i’m failing you”. Surprisingly this rarely happened and i could get away with borrowing books from the school’s library or friends. It’s all a scam.
I had a few cool teachers that would do their own research and make their own “supplemental” class materials and would either hand them out for free or charge like 5 bucks for it. It was condensed to have the most important info and had really good stuff. I think i have most of it from my art classes still.
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Exactly this. I poured tons of money into the “required” supplies at first, before realizing that several of the professors hadn’t changed their ‘required supplies & books’ lists in something like 15 years and I’d spent hundreds of dollars on things like rubylith, letraset lettering guides, slide rules, and other now-useless pre-computer-age design tools (many of which are still in boxes somewhere). After the first semester I learned to buy things as needed and share costs with other students, or make use of what I could find for free.
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