Also see the installation of "HALO" type detectors in schools.
They use zero-party audio recording to detect 'gunshots' (why the fuck does a school need this to detect gunshots which will be heard throughout the whole school? Are they expecting the world's quietest silencer?) And I put in quotes, because gunshots here seems like a thinly veiled way to try and finagle around illegally recording people.
They also invade the bathrooms with 'vape' detectors that smell the children at all times to make sure they are in compliance.
Society generally puts maximal responsibility on school administrators for the well-being of students, so it should not be surprising that they will take maximal measures in response to that expectation. They are ultimately risk mitigators, not privacy ethicists, what would you expect them to do?
I'm just saying administrators would not take these measures if they didn't see less risk in taking them than in not.
Anecdotally, I see Xennial/Millennial 'helicopter' parents expect universities to take broad, often intrusive measures for the well-being of their children, and their (legally) adult children tend to go along with that expectation.
School boards have increasingly been taken over by people actively looking to dismantle our education systems. This is a battle that has to be won on multiple fronts to make an impact.
Seems like they are saying the left is trying to change the curriculum, not dismantle the education system. The push toward privitization and homeschooling is pretty lopsided.
They're expected to have complete control of the students and are held responsible like they have complete control.
How the hell else are they supposed to act? I genuinely don't blame the schools here. I blame every single person who expects the schools to hold all encompassing control over a group of kids.
This of course is about Covid, but the rise of LLMs is another point where students are supposed to become less private, opening up their devices to monitoring software.
I think that there is exactly one correct direction to take here, which is that direct human interaction is the most valuable thing, both in learning and in keeping students mentally and physically healthy. Every single surrogate for that inevitably will make all of these aspects worse.
Well, we do have to stay safe out there. We're in a pandemic.
It amuses me that my rave groups already did contact tracing for respiratory illnesses before the pandemic and perhaps because of the large Asian friend group I’m part of we wore masks in more normal contexts when we had a cold.
To be honest, most of the people designing the interventions are just generally short of mental horsepower and strong in self-belief. So they come up with novel approaches that aren’t really required. The fact that there are students who aren’t pro-social on campus complicated things but that’s a self-imposed problem.
It can’t be helped: this is what happens with The Sort. If they were smarter they wouldn’t be college admins.
I wonder how far the overlap is in the Venn diagram of people who thought the pandemic would lead to an "Orwellian nightmare" and the people who voted for Trump and support DOGE, ICE and the administration's oppression of political wrongthink in universities. I'd bet it's an almost perfect circle.
Does privacy even exist anywhere? I assume that my work computer has a key logger to track if I ever type something nasty. Potentially records me to see if I am using an above average amount of profanity while coding.
This article…the kind of technology described herein, and other places which gets cast in a suspicious light, is actually quite useful.
The problem with the information such technology affords, however, is that any primitive-minded human may misuse or abuse what they get out of it.
The human mind has not wholly updated beyond family or tribe level self-preservation, but I guess some results have yielded from prior waves of cultural evolution. The only practical advice is that one should try to build in safeguards against abuse and misuse.
Working in a German university. I had students in my courses where we noticed after two semesters that they aren't even studying here (not as if that was a problem, tuition is free and they were adding good spirits to the courses).
Not only is it worse, but I doubt it is even true in any meaningful sense. Even if the humans aren't 'listening in' and only the student gets the feedback directly, surely there are logs that contain at the very least metadata which a human can very much 'listen in' on and absent regulation with heavy penalties, will listen in on either individually or in aggregate and which could be hacked and sold.
Yea, I don't know where that idea came from. Maybe the Boomer generation when machines didn't have practically unlimited storage and internet access where that data then can be crawled over by countless algorithms to judge your life and how you'll live from now on.
The worst part is the algorithms don't even have to be correct. A ton of algorithms, designed to find transgressions, likely judged by purchasers by how many they find. Eventually they are relied upon and are standard for ass covering. But people don't understand how they work so give them a level of trust you wouldn't extend to a person doing the same task.
They use zero-party audio recording to detect 'gunshots' (why the fuck does a school need this to detect gunshots which will be heard throughout the whole school? Are they expecting the world's quietest silencer?) And I put in quotes, because gunshots here seems like a thinly veiled way to try and finagle around illegally recording people.
They also invade the bathrooms with 'vape' detectors that smell the children at all times to make sure they are in compliance.