Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: FlamingCobra on September 11, 2013, 12:39:06 pm
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http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130902/13154624384/ca-school-district-announces-its-doing-round-the-clock-monitoring-its-13000-students-social-media-activities.shtml
So apparently what kids say and do outside of school is no longer their "private life".
I guess the one good thing about this is that kids growing up under this system will be fully prepared for their adult life where everything they say and do is monitored by the NSA!
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Unless they can see PMs, I see no problem with this. That information has been made public to the whole World. They can look at it if they want.
And there it is:
If you would like to ensure content that you post through a social media platform or profile is not monitored by Geo Listening, you should ensure that your social media posts are non-public. Geo Listening only collects publicly available information. Therefore, if a social media platform includes settings that allow you to designate your posts as private, doing so will ensure your posts will not be collected.
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In today's world, nothing is private unless you become a netless hermit. All of your thoughts are out in the open for people to find and (mis)interpret, (mis)judge and exploit. Welcome to the future. Welcome to Hell.
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So schools don't teach anymore, they spy? Where are you headed, world?
Whether these information are public or not, why is school gathering them? This is the case. Its not what its for.
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The information is already public. I don't think this system will really help anything, though. Maybe it's different in US, but around here, the majority of conversations on Facebook are done through PMs. It probably would catch some minor stuff, but I'd say it's somewhat of a waste of money.
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wait, this is news? this has been going on for years
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wait, this is news? this has been going on for years
indeed
schools, employers, the government, (even the department for work and pensions in the uk) all monitor social networking and have done for years with public knowledge. no new news here
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I can see this going really badly for the school somehow. Not sure how, but I have a pretty good feeling it will.
I retract my earlier comment. Continue.
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So just make everything private. A good way to weed out idiots
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Kids need to learn that:
1. Anything put publicly on the Internet is for all intents and purposes permanent, and
2. Anything not explicitly made secure and private online is the equivalent of going to the busiest corner on the busiest street of the largest city in your country and shouting it repeatedly to everyone that goes by for an infinite period of time.
I for one think it's great that schools are teaching those lessons to their students, even if it isn't intentional. The number of kids who treat their facebook accounts as a private space is insane.
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The number of kids who treat their facebook accounts as a private space is insane.
Which is exactly why you've gotta keep your murdering thoughts to forums under an alias that you totally don't use anywhere but the forums!
...****
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I am glad I am don't live in the US. That makes me even more paranoid.
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I would be incredibly surprised if this wasn't a worldwide practice.
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I'm waiting to find out the NSA has a worldwide collection of fingerprints from people using the new iphone...
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Really, I don't see what the people are getting worked up about. It's basically "schools will now officially pay somebody to surf Facebook". There's no spying going on there, just reading the site. That info could be checked by anyone with internet access, be it an American government employee, a bored teenager in Greece or a random office drone in Poland (considering everything, those people probably spend most of their time on FB anyway). In short, anyone who uses Facebook and can speak English. I don't think most kids will invite their school employee to friends, either, so the data gathered will probably be only what the rest of the world can see. So I don't see a problem here. It's like publishing a newspaper article for physicists, then complaining non-physicists are also reading it.
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Except that's not exactly what is happening.
While I do absolutely agree that schools need to teach the topic of privacy and how to keep it, I am pretty sure that things that students do after hours are none of the schools' business.
See, the thing is, this kind of monitoring will inevitably lead to some kid somewhere suffering consequences for his or her words online far in excess of what is warranted.
From the article, it says their remit is to "provide Glendale school officials with a daily report that categorizes posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy. "
How long do you guess does it take for someone to use this monitoring system to subvert it so that some innocent third party is harassed by these watchdogs (and school officials!)?
I can see the intent behind these efforts, but remember what they say about the path to hell. A system like this is far too easy to subvert and to circumvent, and thus far too prone for false results to be any good at what it does. We've already had instances where schools that issued Laptops to their students installed spyware from hell on the machines (including keyloggers and the ability to remote-control cameras); while the system under discussion here may seem more benign, it does represent an inacceptible assumption of responsibility on the part of the school. There needs to be a sharp boundary between areas where the school has responsibility, and where the parents do.
If the school wishes to monitor how its on-site equipment is used, and prohibit certain usages, that's their right. But as soon as it intrudes into areas where students should have a reasonable expectation of privacy, it's time to back the **** off.
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Since when is school/employer/whatever supposed to track you on the internet? Yes, they will find only the things you let them, but how does this change how ****ed up this scheme is? When you go shopping it's also public isn't it? School is for teaching, not gathering "intelligence".
Also, pretty much what The_E said.
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The thing is, this isn't new. This kind of stuff has been happening since well before cell phones were invented.
It will simply be more efficient and impersonal, now. Oh, and managed by ex-cons. :D
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I am pretty sure that things that students do after hours are none of the schools' business.
You're - unfortunately - pretty wrong.
There is more and more policy and legal recognition now that bullying extends well beyond school as well, and schools are increasingly under a microscope for how they respond to behaviours outside of school that may continue at school. A number of high-profile suicides in the US and Canada in particular are perpetuating this.
Society - and parents who don't adequately supervise and/or discipline their children - have made student behaviour outside of school the schools' business.
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That effectively completely takes away several constitutional rights of minors, does it not?
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That effectively completely takes away several constitutional rights of minors, does it not?
Which ones?
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i dont think minors have any rights anymore.
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You're - unfortunately - pretty wrong.
There is more and more policy and legal recognition now that bullying extends well beyond school as well, and schools are increasingly under a microscope for how they respond to behaviours outside of school that may continue at school. A number of high-profile suicides in the US and Canada in particular are perpetuating this.
See, I don't technically disagree with the idea that schools should be proactive regarding bullying, but I disagree that a blanket surveillance regime is the right answer. If a limited investigation is started after a particular case comes to light, then it's a good idea to trawl through social media, but I remain convinced that this kind of total, untargeted surveillance is bad.
Society - and parents who don't adequately supervise and/or discipline their children - have made student behaviour outside of school the schools' business.
But is it necessary to put all students under surveillance? Is it necessary to introduce chilling effects like this? Shouldn't the focus be more on educating the parents instead of policing the children?
I know this is an idealist view, but we do not expect companies to keep tabs on their employees after hours, despite the various instances of bullying and abuse that happen in the workplace, so why do you believe it's acceptable for schools to do this?
In german, we have the word "Generalverdacht" for these kinds of things. It means a general assumption of guilt, which is what these programs effectively operate on. I would like to return to a general presumption of innocence instead.
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That effectively completely takes away several constitutional rights of minors, does it not?
Which ones?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
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How long before it moves from monitoring publicly available info to a requirement for access to private info? Don't hand over your myspace or facebook password get disciplinary action. Unlock your phone and present it upon demand so your texts can be reviewed. Random browser history checks before lunch? Where does it end.
Of course all this makes me glad I don't even have text messaging on my phone plan and have never even visited any social media site.
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That effectively completely takes away several constitutional rights of minors, does it not?
Which ones?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Excuse me if I'm wrong here, but if you post anything on a social network...especially noting the term 'social,' which, last time I checked, means to communicate with other people, then you are offering that information "to the public."
There is most definitely no violation of the 4th amendment if you wave a bag of weed in front of a police officer, nor should it be considered any violation if you post something online and authorities, be they police, school management, or otherwise, find it and proceed to question your motivation for having done so.
As for minors, and I'm sorry if this offends any minors here, but the simple fact is that other people are on the hook for your behavior, be they parents, teachers, police officers, doctors, you name it, and each and every one of them has both a legal and a moral responsibility, not to investigate your private life, but to act if information made public, by you...constitutes in any way seemingly unhealthy or inappropriate behavior.
Like it or not, the people in power want to shape society to be "better," regardless of what the definition of "better" means to you. The truth is you have a choice, but the choice you have is whether or not to use the most massive communications network in the world to spotlight yourself.
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So "this **** you placed in a media site is public" therefore we should think any public institution scanning everything you post isn't just ****ing creepy, out of its mind, flat out overreaching its purpose?
People are confusing here legal issues with ethics. YEAH, it may be legal for a school to scroll down every single tweet or facebook post you created, it's still weirdo behavior! And, again, the excuse of being for "our defense", for "our own good". Jesus F Christ, the last thing I want is for some bunch of Tea Party fanatics come to me and say "SEE? What did I say to you? SEE?" and you all just go hook line and sinker with this.
Come on, reclaim your own dignity for chrissakes.
And, of COURSE, I mean, this idea that legality is even an issue. AS IF we aren't being scanned and policed by the NSA right now, even though I'm portuguese and haven't any chance of voting for anyone in 'MURICA.
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That was the entire point of making a free and uncensored internet, with no types of regulation on traffic...
...now wasn't it?
And the point of posting information in public internet boards is so that other people...can see it.
If we were talking about schools hacking people's accounts or sniffing traffic to see what they posted online, maybe I'd agree with you, but not when it comes to institutions looking at what's readily available online.
As for ethics, there just simply isn't anything unethical about opening your eyes and looking at the world around you. That's common sense. The alternative is encouraging everyone to stick their heads in the ground and turn a blind eye to anything they disapprove of.
The country I currently live in has people that do this all of the time which is absolutely terrible considering that it's the only country to ever have suffered not one, not two, but three nuclear accidents. Even after the first two intentional bombings, you'd think...you'd just think they'd have one hell of an oversight committee watching every step any nuclear-related association takes, but the exact opposite is true.
I am all for people watching the government and/or private organizations and bringing to light any illegal or suspicious activity. Likewise, I have to be willing to let the government and public institutions monitor private citizens as well.
It's your own fault if you post something online and it comes back to bite you in the ass. If you want to have a private experience with your friends, go out in the woods where nobody is around and have it there. Don't do it on the world's most advanced communications network.
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You're - unfortunately - pretty wrong.
There is more and more policy and legal recognition now that bullying extends well beyond school as well, and schools are increasingly under a microscope for how they respond to behaviours outside of school that may continue at school. A number of high-profile suicides in the US and Canada in particular are perpetuating this.
See, I don't technically disagree with the idea that schools should be proactive regarding bullying, but I disagree that a blanket surveillance regime is the right answer. If a limited investigation is started after a particular case comes to light, then it's a good idea to trawl through social media, but I remain convinced that this kind of total, untargeted surveillance is bad.
Society - and parents who don't adequately supervise and/or discipline their children - have made student behaviour outside of school the schools' business.
But is it necessary to put all students under surveillance? Is it necessary to introduce chilling effects like this? Shouldn't the focus be more on educating the parents instead of policing the children?
I know this is an idealist view, but we do not expect companies to keep tabs on their employees after hours, despite the various instances of bullying and abuse that happen in the workplace, so why do you believe it's acceptable for schools to do this?
In german, we have the word "Generalverdacht" for these kinds of things. It means a general assumption of guilt, which is what these programs effectively operate on. I would like to return to a general presumption of innocence instead.
I was pointing out that you're wrong in practice, not that your assertion is ideologically wrong.
I agree that schools have some role in addressing bullying that occurs on and off their physical sites, but I think the major problem - which schools are now trying to deal with and shouldn't - is that the most serious cases of bullying virtually always cross the line of criminal offences, yet parents and police have been historically unwilling to pursue charges because "it's just kids."
Passing around a topless picture of a teenage girl is distribution of child pornography, regardless of the age of the person who does it. Death threats and repeated hang-up-calls, unsolicited text messages, and hounding are criminal harassment. The point is that these laws have to be actually enforced.
Instead, collective wisdom seems to think schools have to deal with it. Hence the creation of policies like those in the OP. They're not Constitutionally-invalid, they're not illegal, and they're actually not even improper - but it's pretty sad that social failings have led schools to start data-mining their students' social media accounts.
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How long before it moves from monitoring publicly available info to a requirement for access to private info? Don't hand over your myspace or facebook password get disciplinary action. Unlock your phone and present it upon demand so your texts can be reviewed. Random browser history checks before lunch? Where does it end.
Of course all this makes me glad I don't even have text messaging on my phone plan and have never even visited any social media site.
Slippery slope arguments are generally invalid and intellectually lazy. Not only would such a policy be illegal (by any public school, at any rate), but completely impractical.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
A school policy monitoring public social media posts does not constitute a violation of the Congressional prohibition for legislation on freedom of speech. Contrary to popular belief, the US protections on freedom of speech extend only to legislative actions by government, and only to actions that explicitly seek to censor speech. This policy doesn't even come close to qualifying.
Second, security from unreasonable search and seizure applies only to areas of ones life where there is a reasonable belief of privacy (which is weighted not as a binary factor, but as a continuum). Posting information publicly is treated in the same manner by the Courts as shouting it in the middle of a busy street. Public postings on social media have no privacy interest attached, and therefore anyone - law enforcement, schools, your employer, your ex-wife, etc - may freely monitor and record them as they please. Furthermore, the 4th amendment applies only to government searches and seizures. Private employers are free to institute policies to search your person as they generally please (within reason) without running afoul of the Constitution (they may run afoul of employment law). Schools fall somewhere in between, but are generally permitted to search student lockers, bags, and persons as they please. They may NOT do so to further the purposes of a government agency (like law enforcement), but may do so for their own purposes.
In short - there is no prohibition on ANYONE that prevents monitoring of public postings on the web. Like I said before, if you post it online, assume that you're doing the same thing as shouting it on a busy street because that's all the privacy protection it gets. Unfortunately, most people do not understand this.
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In german, we have the word "Generalverdacht" for these kinds of things. It means a general assumption of guilt, which is what these programs effectively operate on. I would like to return to a general presumption of innocence instead.
Oh~ Now why would you be pushing so hard for us to think you're innocent? "Thou dost protest too much!" Are you sure you aren't a terrorist? (http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-smuggo.gif)
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How long before it moves from monitoring publicly available info to a requirement for access to private info? Don't hand over your myspace or facebook password get disciplinary action. Unlock your phone and present it upon demand so your texts can be reviewed. Random browser history checks before lunch? Where does it end.
Of course all this makes me glad I don't even have text messaging on my phone plan and have never even visited any social media site.
Slippery slope arguments are generally invalid and intellectually lazy. Not only would such a policy be illegal (by any public school, at any rate), but completely impractical.
Yea tell that to companies that already have put in place policies that require access to private areas of your social networking. Some even require you give them your passwords as part of the job interview. Yes you can say no and not get the job or move to a different company but kids usually don't have such options with which school they go to. This will be pushed as far as they can push it. Sooner or later it will end up in courts probably after a number of suicides due to misuse of the obtained information that shames the kids. The schools in trying to force anti-bullying will have the same effect on some kids as the bullies.
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Yea tell that to companies that already have put in place policies that require access to private areas of your social networking. Some even require you give them your passwords as part of the job interview. Yes you can say no and not get the job or move to a different company but kids usually don't have such options with which school they go to. This will be pushed as far as they can push it. Sooner or later it will end up in courts probably after a number of suicides due to misuse of the obtained information that shames the kids. The schools in trying to force anti-bullying will have the same effect on some kids as the bullies.
For one - the legal framework which governs the behaviour of contractual relationships, such as those that exist between employer and employee, is fundamentally different from the legal framework that governs the behaviour of school administrations. This is well established in law in the United States in particular.
For two - there is privacy law that establishes that asking interviewees for their social media logins and passwords is illegal in many jurisdictions. Monitoring potential and actual employee social media that's public doesn't violate privacy laws.
For three - you have zero evidence that the information collected will be misused, zero evidence that it will necessarily shame the kids, and zero evidence that suicides will result from collection of publicly-available information and provision of summaries of it to school officials. This is all conjecture, and poorly-rationalized conjecture at that. You are making the same argument as people who say if homosexuals get married then the entire fabric of society will collapse. Uh, no.
You're arguing slippery slope, a position which is factually untenable for all the reasons above. I'm really trying hard not to link to a recently-posted resource on acceptable logical uses in debate. Really. All of the things you've mentioned could happen. Pigs could also evolve wings and start trans-continental migrations. Possibility does not speak to probability.
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And the point of posting information in public internet boards is so that other people...can see it.
People, not institutions stalking and watching every move you possibly make.
If we were talking about schools hacking people's accounts or sniffing traffic to see what they posted online, maybe I'd agree with you, but not when it comes o institutions looking at what's readily available online.
JFC, this is precisely what I meant about the difference between legality and ethics. YES, it is legal, NO it is ****ing creepy and stalk behavior nonsensical drivel. It's "totalitarian", in that Orwell "I see everything you do" sense.
As for ethics, there just simply isn't anything unethical about opening your eyes and looking at the world around you. That's common sense. The alternative is encouraging everyone to stick their heads in the ground and turn a blind eye to anything they disapprove of.
It's not their duty to approve or disapprove about things they have absolutely no business to be involved in in the first place. If bullying occurs, then the people involved or the people who observe it should point it to the school or to someone who can deal with it. As you say, the information is available. You don't need any "preemptive" spying to occur beforehand.
The country I currently live in has people that do this all of the time which is absolutely terrible considering that it's the only country to ever have suffered not one, not two, but three nuclear accidents. Even after the first two intentional bombings, you'd think...you'd just think they'd have one hell of an oversight committee watching every step any nuclear-related association takes, but the exact opposite is true.
I don't have a clue of what you are talking about and I sincerely think it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I am all for people watching the government and/or private organizations and bringing to light any illegal or suspicious activity. Likewise, I have to be willing t let the government and public institutions monitor private citizens as well.
They should mind managing their own **** and get it together instead of watching my life.
It's your own fault if you post something online and it comes back to bite you in the ass. If you want to have a private experience with your friends, go out in the woods where nobody is around and have it there. Don't do it on the world's most advanced communications network.
There's a difference between what I expect from any third party that will have their own interests that I have no control over and what I can criticize about government or schools or other public institutions. I will *have* to accept it, since ahem it's ****ing legal. I also have the right to call them weirdos, ****s and assholes for behaving in such a creepy stalking fashion.
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you have zero evidence that the information collected will be misused, zero evidence that it will necessarily shame the kids, and zero evidence that suicides will result from collection of publicly-available information and provision of summaries of it to school officials. This is all conjecture, and poorly-rationalized conjecture at that. You are making the same argument as people who say if homosexuals get married then the entire fabric of society will collapse. Uh, no.
This is a load of .... you get the drift!
Law of Murphy should be ample evidence that this law will be abused, and I always take for granted that laws will be used to their limits. They will be "abused" so to speak. The idea behind it is evil and should be squashed like a bug. Schools and institutions should respect everyone's privacy and not indulge in this overzealous protective bull**** that is just a nightmarish overreach of the idea of a "Nanny State".
"You are making the same argum..." I just hate when people start talking like this. No, it's not the same argument. It's the reality. The society is *already* collapsing to this truth that everyone is spied upon. It's like you aren't paying attention to all the shenanigans involving the NSA and how apparently every country's government is merely jealous of the technological advantage that the US has over them, not about the ethical problems associated with it. Companies *do* wonder about your online activities and *do* pressure you to see your own facebook pages, etc. This is not some "dystopian nightmare" that some lunatic is bringing up to scaremonger you. It's reality. It's happening all over the place and it will only get worse.
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Law of Murphy should be ample evidence that this law will be abused, and I always take for granted that laws will be used to their limits. They will be "abused" so to speak.
Popular sentiment is not evidence, Luis. Furthermore, this school policy is not a law. Indeed, the potential for abuse of voluntarily and publicly posted information collected from public spaces is pretty much zero. Your right to privacy for publicly-shared information is zero.
The idea behind it is evil and should be squashed like a bug. Schools and institutions should respect everyone's privacy and not indulge in this overzealous protective bull**** that is just a nightmarish overreach of the idea of a "Nanny State".
You'll note I have never said I agreed with the practice, merely that it is perfectly legal.
"You are making the same argum..." I just hate when people start talking like this. No, it's not the same argument. It's the reality. The society is *already* collapsing to this truth that everyone is spied upon. It's like you aren't paying attention to all the shenanigans involving the NSA and how apparently every country's government is merely jealous of the technological advantage that the US has over them, not about the ethical problems associated with it. Companies *do* wonder about your online activities and *do* pressure you to see your own facebook pages, etc. This is not some "dystopian nightmare" that some lunatic is bringing up to scaremonger you. It's reality. It's happening all over the place and it will only get worse.
Hi! Back in the piece that we're arguing about, schools in one district have a policy in which they have hired a company to collect publicly-posted material from social media and collate it. Why are you launching into full-on moral panic phase? Again, slippery slope arguments are foolish, especially when we're not even talking about a law that would lead to the supposed slippery slope. We're not talking about a law at all.
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Also note, if the system does get abused, what stops anyone from going to court about it? Afterall, that's the point of the justice system. No system is entirely abuse-proof, but we have ways of punishing people who try that. There's no evidence that monitoring public data can lead to embarrassment and suicides, quite the contrary, this could help with preventing situations like that. Parents often don't watch what their kids are doing on Facebook, but considering what kids post there, somebody definitely should. You occasionally see this, a tragedy occurs and after the fact, they look on the kid's Facebook or Twitter and say "we could have seen it coming!".
I'd say, this decision is, in fact, a very good thing, which could actually help reduce bullying. Granted, parents are the ones who should be doing that, but since they aren't, school needs to take over this. It's the parents' fault it came to this. Just like you don't leave a child alone for a day in an empty house, you can't leave him/her fool around the internet completely unchecked. Some people still don't realize that the internet is just as dangerous as any other public place. Kids are not supposed to have the sort of privacy adults have, precisely because they're kids and need supervision.
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Allow me to summarize this briefly:
1. Students place social media posts in a public space, without privacy protections, voluntarily and of their own free will.
2. Courts acknowledge that public posting on the Internet attract the same privacy protections as speech in public on a busy street - that is to say, none.
3. A school district in California, which is not a legislative body, has implemented a policy of hiring a company to monitor public social media postings of its students.
4. Despite the fact that this is not a violation of Constitutional rights or privacy law, or the result of the enacting of any law, or being carried out by an intelligence or law-enforcement body, this policy is wrong because:
a) Constitution!
b) Privacy!
c) If public things are monitored then kids will be forced to give up their passwords and have their information abused and will all commit suicide and there will be no more children and the human race will end and oh what a shame that is so we definitely shouldn't ever have policies that monitor public information because it means the end of the human race! (hyperbole intentional)
d) NSA! OMGWEREALLBEINGSPIEDON.
To which I react with:
:wtf: or :nono:
Look, folks, if you want to argue that the policy is wrong because schools really should (in your opinion) have no obligation or need to implement such a policy and parents should instead take responsibility for monitoring/policing the behaviour of their children online or offline, I fully agree with you. But most of the arguments bandied about in this thread are either flat-wrong factually, or unsupportable because they argue slippery-slope nonsense. As I said earlier, I'd actually say the policy is a perfect lesson to kids and their parents that nothing on the Internet is private, especially things you don't actually set as private!
There are many reasonable and valid premises on which to argue this policy is asinine. Just don't try to tell me we're nearing the end times because a school is monitoring public information. (https://lh3.ggpht.com/_jiUQ7PmvS8c/TTB9hThBdVI/AAAAAAAAAEI/0RixljBOBuk/s400/tin-foil-hat.jpg)
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I personally agree with the policy. I imagine it would work with data being collected, and only if the data hit whatever flags the program was looking for, would a person end up casting eyes over the material at all. Or if someone was reported as a bully, then the material would be instantly available. Your normal kid would surely never come under scrutiny, they're just one of hundreds of people, they can't have an intimate knowledge of every one, only the select very few who warrant looking at.
This talk of stalking, there would be nothing to stop say a paedophile teacher from going online to look at the posts of a person, because they would choose that person by seeing them and having access to their records already, not this system.
But this is also a good consideration:
As I said earlier, I'd actually say the policy is a perfect lesson to kids and their parents that nothing on the Internet is private, especially things you don't actually set as private!
Just don't try to tell me we're nearing the end times because a school is monitoring public information.
Would you rather your kid gets caught out by the school while they're a kid, or in a much more serious way in later years as an adult? Whether that be by some criminal, or getting fired from their job, as you semi-frequently see happen to people in the spotlight due to a twitter post or suchlike.
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Please tell me HOW on earth am I supposed to bring up evidence of a kind of practice that is only NOW beggining to take hold?
This kind of "empiricism takes all" approach is getting tiresome and old real fast. It's like trying to debate Chomsky... Look you don't need evidence to observe the obvious, and the obvious is that society is going in a direction where the term "privacy" is getting shorter and shorter in practice and in theory. Where all the shades of gray between "absolute privacy" and "absolute public" are getting crushed and thrown into the public sphere by default, and the excuses are always the same, "it's about your safety and the safety of your children", etc. Watchmen will never go wrong in any of this, so you can be ASSuRED no abuse will be commited.
Excuse me? Really? Are we now ignoring centuries of actual data on how human beings behave and abuse every single system they inhabit in exchange of a mindless empirical naiveté of "but you have no EVIDENCE that people will misbehave". Yeah, of course I have no evidence of something that will happen in the future, NOR DO I NEED TO. I just have to know how humans behave within their systems and with respect to the allowances they are given, and this kind of direction we are headed is a nightmare in the making. And what bothers me even more is that people don't even take any of this **** seriously! It's as if all the scandals have never happened and we just pretend people are angels!
Bloody hell.
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Please tell me HOW on earth am I supposed to bring up evidence of a kind of practice that is only NOW beggining to take hold?
This kind of "empiricism takes all" approach is getting tiresome and old real fast. It's like trying to debate Chomsky... Look you don't need evidence to observe the obvious, and the obvious is that society is going in a direction where the term "privacy" is getting shorter and shorter in practice and in theory. Where all the shades of gray between "absolute privacy" and "absolute public" are getting crushed and thrown into the public sphere by default, and the excuses are always the same, "it's about your safety and the safety of your children", etc. Watchmen will never go wrong in any of this, so you can be ASSuRED no abuse will be commited.
Excuse me? Really? Are we now ignoring centuries of actual data on how human beings behave and abuse every single system they inhabit in exchange of a mindless empirical naiveté of "but you have no EVIDENCE that people will misbehave". Yeah, of course I have no evidence of something that will happen in the future, NOR DO I NEED TO. I just have to know how humans behave within their systems and with respect to the allowances they are given, and this kind of direction we are headed is a nightmare in the making. And what bothers me even more is that people don't even take any of this **** seriously! It's as if all the scandals have never happened and we just pretend people are angels!
Bloody hell.
Should we stop trying to do good things, because people might twist them and do bad things?
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I haven't yet read any single positive notion about this "thing" other than "it's for your own good we monitor these things, trust us!"
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I haven't yet read any single positive notion about this "thing" other than "it's for your own good we monitor these things, trust us!"
If it stops some kids cutting and killing themselves, I call that a big result.
Oh, has anyone ever watched the movie Odd Girl Out? Personally I think it's really good. It deals with all kinds of bullying including cyber bullying.
I particularly liked the way they cast the victim, instead of going for the stereotypes, you know, fat/disabled/loner, etc, which are increasingly becoming more and more out of date, they took a pretty girl, and cast her as one of the popular kids at the school. Then she is turned against, and you watch as she spirals down and down...
Here it is if anyone is interested, it's the cyber bullying part of it which makes me think of it:
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i miss solving issues with bullies with an unpredictable and spontaneous surge of violence. keep this up and the next generation of american adults is going to loose the country to the french.
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Please tell me HOW on earth am I supposed to bring up evidence of a kind of practice that is only NOW beggining to take hold?
If your slippery-slope argument holds any validity, you should be able to come up with at least one related example.
Instead, you (and FUBAR) are asking us to infer an effect from an indistinct cause. You keep saying this will continue a trend of erosion of privacy, when in fact the material subject to the policy has no attached privacy consideration whatsoever. Consider the following variation on a popular meme:
1. Student publicly posts on Facebook.
2. School sees and makes record of public student post on Facebook.
3. ???
4. Student is embarassed by something school collects and commits suicide (FUBAR) AND/OR government collects all of student's private-not-just-public information because it wants it for some nefarious reason (Luis).
There is a gigantic logical/evidentiary failure in and around point 3.
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Without it having already happened you can't give an example, by the time it gets to the point examples are available it's too late.
Let's take a hypothetical. A student gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion. She has been missing quite a bit of school in the past 2 weeks due to dealing with the emotional problems caused by such a situation. The school decides to do a thorough monitoring of her activity and links her main identity to a secondary handle she is using to keep her identity secret while looking up information and asking questions on forums. Is it possible someone else might find this information yes but not as likely as someone that is getting paid to look for it. Now in the process of the company reporting this information to the administration another student or even a teacher overhears the conversation or sees the report lying on a desk. That person then discusses it with others. The rumor mill starts and eventually this student is found out. The embarrassment is enought to push her over the edge and she can't live with it and takes her own life.
Now without that digging the issue could have been handled privately by her family and no one in the school would have known.
Also as far as slippery slopes go I'd rather drive slow and watch out for the ice then wait until there is a 50 car pileup before I hit the breaks.
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On one hand, searching PUBLIC information is not an invasion of privacy.
On the other hand, the public school system has absolutely no business monitoring or interfering with students' lives outside of school. It's only a matter of time for the schools start handing out punishments for things that happened in the outside world; I'm hoping someone slaps the system with a lawsuit right out of the gate and the power-mad school administrators get a punch in the wallet. On the list of people who REALLY shouldn't have any more power than they already do, school administrators rank right up there with HOA presidents.
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Thank goodness we can finally pay a real professional to peep in on our kids' inevitable indiscretions! There is absolutely no reason to doubt anyone who would want that job, no sir.
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Without it having already happened you can't give an example, by the time it gets to the point examples are available it's too late.
See above.
The school decides to do a thorough monitoring of her activity and links her main identity to a secondary handle she is using to keep her identity secret while looking up information and asking questions on forums. Is it possible someone else might find this information yes but not as likely as someone that is getting paid to look for it. Now in the process of the company reporting this information to the administration another student or even a teacher overhears the conversation or sees the report lying on a desk. That person then discusses it with others. The rumor mill starts and eventually this student is found out. The embarrassment is enought to push her over the edge and she can't live with it and takes her own life.
First, this assumes the school is doing widespread monitoring and somehow perusing secondary sites and pursuing quasi-forensic connections between them and social media. In fact, it isn't:
Public content is collected and provided to school districts from the following websites:
· Twitter;
· Facebook;
· Instagram;
· Picasa;
· Vine;
· Flickr;
· Ask.fm;
· YouTube; and
· Google+.
Second, it assumes that the school will not only receive private information, but will maintain copies of it unsecured in contravention of applicable privacy law (if a school collects public information from a student and condenses it into a private file on student activities, that is covered by privacy legislation and require confidentiality). Best case scenario there is a lawsuit against the school, worst case is criminal charges.
Third, public posts by anyone do not have an inherent privacy interest. If your hypothetical girl has posted information publicly, then it is fair game for anyone to see. Conversely, if someone uses that information to perpetrate bullying, criminal harassment, etc then we have both civil and criminal law that deals with those matters.
AGAIN-
It's not that I agree with the policy. It's that the arguments being presented are quite weak. There are many perfectly valid reasons to oppose such a policy, but slippery-slope / moral panic nonsense undermine the legitimate reasons for opposition and are easily dismissed. Arguments based on conjecture and possibility are never convincing.
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I'm hoping someone slaps the system with a lawsuit right out of the gate and the power-mad school administrators get a punch in the wallet.
On what grounds, exactly? As I've already noted, the policy does not violate any applicable laws.
Really, the best way for the parents and students to tackle this issue is to raise public awareness, oppose the policy on defensible grounds (e.g. this is not the schools' mandate / this is not what schools receive funding for / I am not comfortable with my child's school performing this monitoring because I believe it to be morally wrong), and vote out the school board that brought it in in favour of one that will throw it out.
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I'm hoping someone slaps the system with a lawsuit right out of the gate and the power-mad school administrators get a punch in the wallet.
On what grounds, exactly? As I've already noted, the policy does not violate any applicable laws.
Really, the best way for the parents and students to tackle this issue is to raise public awareness, oppose the policy on defensible grounds (e.g. this is not the schools' mandate / this is not what schools receive funding for / I am not comfortable with my child's school performing this monitoring because I believe it to be morally wrong), and vote out the school board that brought it in in favour of one that will throw it out.
No, they aren't breaking any laws. But, I'm hoping for the inevitable lawsuit(s) and attention from the judicial system because that needs to change. The authority of the schools is spreading far too thinly as it stands; they're losing ground in their ability to punish students for things that happen at school thanks to overzealous (and terrible) parenting and it seems to me that they're trying to consolidate power elsewhere. The problem is that we already have a system for punishing criminal acts outside of the schools.
They're probably overstepping their boundaries; the main problem is that those boundaries aren't very well-defined. Where do we draw the line between the school system and police? At the very least, getting attention from the courts will hopefully result in having those boundaries more clearly defined.
I completely agree with you, though. I just don't think that there's going to be a resolution outside of the courts. If we vote down one school board mandate, they'll just make another sneakier one, like this endless parade of BS SOPA/PIPA clone legislation.
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Thank goodness we can finally pay a real professional to peep in on our kids' inevitable indiscretions! There is absolutely no reason to doubt anyone who would want that job, no sir.
So, maybe someone or someone who knew someone (and there are many) who got bullied as a kid would like to take that job to stop it happening to others? Or perhaps one of those teachers that got driven out of the class because it was too stressful could take up this job instead. Or simply some normal person who needs a job. There's plenty of those around too you know.
Or we could just assume that somehow out of however many normal people apply for that job, the school will somehow end up picking some lowlife.
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No, they aren't breaking any laws. But, I'm hoping for the inevitable lawsuit(s) and attention from the judicial system because that needs to change. The authority of the schools is spreading far too thinly as it stands; they're losing ground in their ability to punish students for things that happen at school thanks to overzealous (and terrible) parenting and it seems to me that they're trying to consolidate power elsewhere. The problem is that we already have a system for punishing criminal acts outside of the schools.
They're probably overstepping their boundaries; the main problem is that those boundaries aren't very well-defined. Where do we draw the line between the school system and police? At the very least, getting attention from the courts will hopefully result in having those boundaries more clearly defined.
I completely agree with you, though. I just don't think that there's going to be a resolution outside of the courts. If we vote down one school board mandate, they'll just make another sneakier one, like this endless parade of BS SOPA/PIPA clone legislation.
The point is that there are no legitimate grounds for a lawsuit. Anyone trying to file one would likely find themselves forking over not only their own legal expenses, but those of the school board as well. While a lawsuit would raise the matter in the public consciousness, it either wouldn't be accepted as there are no grounds, or it would be accepted then dismissed, likely with costs awarded. Either way, it means people trying to fight the policy being out a considerable sum of money for no gain other than publicity, which can be easily achieved through other means.
While litigation is firmly embedded in the public consciousness of the United States as a remedy for things people don't like, you actually have to have a claim with some kind of merit in law for it to do anything. So my earlier question to you holds - on what grounds do you think they can sue?
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Exactly. You're essentially proposing suing the school for viewing public information. Where's logic in here?
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FWIW, I agree with MP that this is not a legal issue, it's a political / moral / ethical issue.
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FWIW, I agree with MP that this is not a legal issue, it's a political / moral / ethical issue.
Indeed. And there are many, many relevant, reasonable ways of making that issue known without resorting to dubious claims about legality, slipper slopes, or moral panics.
For example, the Glendale Unified School District appears to have their budget online (http://www.gusd.net/site/Default.aspx?PageID=161). I wonder how much public money is being spent on this monitoring program that could be better spent on actual education?
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... AND/OR government collects all of student's private-not-just-public information because it wants it for some nefarious reason (Luis).
There is a gigantic logical/evidentiary failure in and around point 3.
This is a strawman. Nowhere did I say that the intent is nefarious. Nor do I even understand what is this "government intention". People are people and they'll use and abuse any kind of system, specially one of control and surveillance.
Now I do not see how practically making sure to every student that they are on record about everything they say or write and that someone is hired specifically to watch any missted they make while they are on their own lives and so on as a "positive thing". We are basically creating the scaffold of a society that is taught that their internet lives are 100% controlled by the institution they happen to be studying in or working in.
How is this even supposed to avoid any kind of internet bullying is also pretty much beyond me. The students have too much spare time, too much ingenuity when they are really psyched into things, too much jackassery on their spirits. How will they ever control every account that any cretin will remember to create just to make a photoshop "attack" or to start rumours or to post pictures or whatever? Will they also log every IP and try to track down any kind of anonymous harrassment to their actual real life attacker?
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You could extend the panic to every position in the school or any position which sees someone have children placed in their care.
The humiliation example that was talked about before, I've seen plenty of teachers publicly humiliate students in front of the class.
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That is ridiculous. A teacher publicly humilliating a student is not comparable to a student being at home at night talking to his friends in facebook knowing there's a group of monitors of his school reading their ****.
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This is the ****ing society we are building up:
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.pt/2013/09/in-future-everyone-will-be-fired-after.html
Earlier this week Pax Dickinson, the Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, was fired after a number of his tweets regarding women and minorities drew public outrage. Pax (if that is his real name) is only the latest of a growing series of individuals who lost their jobs after expressing unpopular or offensive views. In July Jack Hunter resigned from a position on Senator Rand Paul's staff after past statements in defense of the Confederacy came to light. In May, Jason Richwine resigned his position with Heritage after the details of his Ph.d dissertation (which speculated on issues involving race and IQ) were reported in the Washington Post. Psychology professor Geoffrey Miller managed to keep his job after one of his "fat shaming" tweets went viral, but was censured by his employer, was forced to undergo sensitivity training, and is subject to a number of other administrative penalties.
And that's just in the last few months. Going back further one can find the same story playing out over and over where an unpopular comment draws popular outrage, leading the offender's employer to (quite rationally) seek to disassociate itself as quickly as possible.
edit:
On the other hand, J.S. Mill's On Liberty (one of the classic defenses of freedom of opinion) was written against both legal *and* social sanctions for unpopular opinions. Given Mill's consequentialist attitudes, this is not really a surprise. If conformity of thought has negative consequences, then those negatives will probably exist regardless of whether the conformity is due to government dictate or to social pressure. Frankly, I've never been sure if the idea of there being no social sanctions for holding any opinion is even possible. It's certainly never been tried. But it is the case where people constantly self-censor their opinions (more than they do now) would probably be a much blander and boring world than the one we have today.
Welcome to the Politically Correct New World Order. The world where no dissent and no abnormal thought can ever see the light of the internet.
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Exactly. You're essentially proposing suing the school for viewing public information. Where's logic in here?
No, my point of contention is in what the schools ultimately do with this information. When they (inevitably) try to punish a student for something that would be disallowed on school grounds but that actually isn't related to that student's conduct at school, that would be the time to raise the issue.
Here's a pretty decent paper on what I'm talking about: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2244564
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No, my point of contention is in what the schools ultimately do with this information. When they (inevitably) try to punish a student for something that would be disallowed on school grounds but that actually isn't related to that student's conduct at school, that would be the time to raise the issue.
Why did you say "inevitably"? Maybe it wouldn't happen. Though in reality, at some point, it probably would happen, in a display of system abuse. Then and only then there would be the time to break out the lawsuit. The lawsuit would not be against the system itself, but rather against the abuser. The system is fine, and if it gets used for what it's intended for, there's no problem and indeed, it could really help against new forms of bullying that appeared recently. No system is entirely abuse-proof, punishing the abusers is what Justice system is for.
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No, my point of contention is in what the schools ultimately do with this information. When they (inevitably) try to punish a student for something that would be disallowed on school grounds but that actually isn't related to that student's conduct at school, that would be the time to raise the issue.
Why did you say "inevitably"? Maybe it wouldn't happen. Though in reality, at some point, it probably would happen, in a display of system abuse. Then and only then there would be the time to break out the lawsuit. The lawsuit would not be against the system itself, but rather against the abuser. The system is fine, and if it gets used for what it's intended for, there's no problem and indeed, it could really help against new forms of bullying that appeared recently. No system is entirely abuse-proof, punishing the abusers is what Justice system is for.
I'd like to think it wouldn't happen, but I respectfully disagree with the assertion that the system is fine as-is. As it stands, there are no legally defined boundaries, and I think that the situation is inviting abuse. I would be happy if the boundaries were clearly defined - if I happen to disagree with where they're set, them's the breaks. But as I see it, if students are committing criminal acts outside of school, we already have authorities that deal with that kind of thing. They're called the police. If they're not committing criminal acts, then the school has no business taking any kind of action. Our justice system isn't perfect, but just monitoring everyone all the time until they inevitably break the law so we can hammer them for every mistake isn't the answer.
Please note the following is very much an opinion: my biggest problem with the whole mess is that our school system just doesn't need to be wasting time and manpower on this kind of thing. They complain about being underfunded and then turn around and spend what money they do get on useless garbage that either has nothing to do with education or just doesn't help as much as actually paying educators what their role in society is worth. Because of the incredibly low wages, public education is no longer an appealing career choice. Private and charter schools in affluent areas can offer better wages and attract all the talent, and it's causing the education gap between the wealthy and the not-wealthy to grow. How much time and money are they planning on wasting on re-enacting 1984?
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... AND/OR government collects all of student's private-not-just-public information because it wants it for some nefarious reason (Luis).
There is a gigantic logical/evidentiary failure in and around point 3.
This is a strawman. Nowhere did I say that the intent is nefarious. Nor do I even understand what is this "government intention". People are people and they'll use and abuse any kind of system, specially one of control and surveillance.
Hmmm.
It's the reality. The society is *already* collapsing to this truth that everyone is spied upon. It's like you aren't paying attention to all the shenanigans involving the NSA and how apparently every country's government is merely jealous of the technological advantage that the US has over them, not about the ethical problems associated with it. Companies *do* wonder about your online activities and *do* pressure you to see your own facebook pages, etc. This is not some "dystopian nightmare" that some lunatic is bringing up to scaremonger you. It's reality. It's happening all over the place and it will only get worse.
Maybe you'd like to clarify your meaning?
Now I do not see how practically making sure to every student that they are on record about everything they say or write and that someone is hired specifically to watch any missted they make while they are on their own lives and so on as a "positive thing". We are basically creating the scaffold of a society that is taught that their internet lives are 100% controlled by the institution they happen to be studying in or working in.
How is this even supposed to avoid any kind of internet bullying is also pretty much beyond me. The students have too much spare time, too much ingenuity when they are really psyched into things, too much jackassery on their spirits. How will they ever control every account that any cretin will remember to create just to make a photoshop "attack" or to start rumours or to post pictures or whatever? Will they also log every IP and try to track down any kind of anonymous harrassment to their actual real life attacker?
All legitimate criticisms of the policy.
I'm getting annoyed that I have to keep repeating myself. I am not in favour of this school policy; I merely point out that a number of the earlier arguments against it (pages 1 and 2, primarily) are/were quite weak.
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Please note the following is very much an opinion: my biggest problem with the whole mess is that our school system just doesn't need to be wasting time and manpower on this kind of thing.
Don't underestimate the positive effect removing disruptive elements has.
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The paper you posted seems to imply that such boundaries already exists (though I'm not a lawyer, it's probably not so simple). I see nothing that indicates school will actually do something about anything that's not criminal action or abusive behavior. If it does overstep it's competences, then then it's off to court.
Our justice system isn't perfect, but just monitoring everyone all the time until they inevitably break the law so we can hammer them for every mistake isn't the answer.
"Inevitably" again. No, it's not inevitable that one will break the law. There are people who carry on with their lives without breaking a single law in their lifetime. In fact, most American people never ran afoul of the law. So, unless you're actually talking about an actual certainty (i.e. death and taxes), stop with the "inevitably". Most people have no business breaking the law.
While making school system responsible for this might not be the best idea, who else would you task with that? The NSA? They're not exactly made for taking care of the children (though given their overinflated funding, they could certainly afford that). A new organization? As if there weren't enough of them already. Schools do have some experience in this matter, so they seem the least problematic choice here. They're underfunded, yes, but perhaps the answer is to increase their funding. As for where to get it? I'm pretty sure NSA and TSA don't need all this money they're getting, especially the latter.
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The paper you posted seems to imply that such boundaries already exists (though I'm not a lawyer, it's probably not so simple). I see nothing that indicates school will actually do something about anything that's not criminal action or abusive behavior. If it does overstep it's competences, then then it's off to court.
Our justice system isn't perfect, but just monitoring everyone all the time until they inevitably break the law so we can hammer them for every mistake isn't the answer.
"Inevitably" again. No, it's not inevitable that one will break the law. There are people who carry on with their lives without breaking a single law in their lifetime. In fact, most American people never ran afoul of the law. So, unless you're actually talking about an actual certainty (i.e. death and taxes), stop with the "inevitably". Most people have no business breaking the law.
While making school system responsible for this might not be the best idea, who else would you task with that? The NSA? They're not exactly made for taking care of the children (though given their overinflated funding, they could certainly afford that). A new organization? As if there weren't enough of them already. Schools do have some experience in this matter, so they seem the least problematic choice here. They're underfunded, yes, but perhaps the answer is to increase their funding. As for where to get it? I'm pretty sure NSA and TSA don't need all this money they're getting, especially the latter.
Everyone has broken the law at some point. We have some really, really ridiculous, overly specific, and laughably outdated laws on the books. In fact, if you look hard enough, you could probably find examples of most people breaking some kind of law every single day. People who go through life with clean records simply either haven't been caught breaking laws or just haven't broken any that are actually enforced. I've never even been pulled over for a traffic violation, but that doesn't mean I've never done anything wrong.
As to who should be monitoring everyone all the time, the correct answer is no one, because there's a critical point where far-reaching power invites far more problems than it solves. At some level, I believe we have to accept that humanity is not perfect, society is not perfect, and no matter how hard we try, some things are going to slip through the cracks. Making everyone into a criminal because they said something unwise once on Facebook is not the answer to...well, whatever sufficiently nebulous problem this surveillance is supposed to solve. Schools becoming big brother because of some generic "think of the children" tagline is unnecessarily alarmist. If this is about bullying, the schools already have the power to cut down on it, and they have for quite some time. The problem is that they're allowing bad parents to interfere with the process. At some point bullying also can run afoul of the law, and that's where the school's authority ends and the police should be informed. And again, if it's for criminal behaviour, that's what the police are for.
If all the schools ever do is inform the proper authorities of possible criminal activity, then there's nothing wrong with that. But if you think they'll stop there, you haven't had to deal with any school administrators. There are already plenty of stories about punishments for non-criminal activity. Do you remember the story about the school laptops that had webcams that could be activated remotely, and that a student was disciplined for "improper behaviour" that took place in his own room? The FBI had to step in and investigate the school district. The really disgusting thing is that using webcams and keyloggers to spy on students wasn't found to be illegal, because it should be. I know that this thread was referring more to public Facebook posts and the like, but again, we already have a system in place for that. If you see illegal behaviour, harassment, or bullying on Facebook, report it to the moderators and the police, if necessary. Educating people about their rights, responsibilities, and obligations is the best possible solution - which, ironically, is part of what the schools are SUPPOSED to be doing, not spying on students.
EDIT: I want to clarify that I'm not trying to come across as confrontational - I don't disagree that the schools have problems, bullying is a problem, harassment is a problem, etc. And, I agree there's really nothing inherently wrong about searching public information. I just don't think turning the school district into the NSA is the right solution.
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Everyone has broken the law at some point.
...
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Popular sentiment is not evidence, Luis. Furthermore, this school policy is not a law. Indeed, the potential for abuse of voluntarily and publicly posted information collected from public spaces is pretty much zero. Your right to privacy for publicly-shared information is zero.
Really?
When you are out in public, anyone who knows you can see your face and recognise you. You've chosen to leave your house and therefore you have no right to assume you won't be noticed. What you are arguing is that this fact makes it perfectly acceptable for the police to track everyone in the country using facial recognition software. Or for a private company to do the same thing.
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I will have some mixed feelings on the day the paparazzi lose their jobs to surveillance drones.
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Everyone has broken the law at some point.
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Seriously, go check out some of the insanely dumb laws that are still in place around the world. In some states in the US, it's still illegal to have sex in any position but missionary.
These laws aren't enforced, because everyone knows that they're dumb, but they still technically COULD be enforced if one was so inclined.
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Maybe you'd like to clarify your meaning?
Well, I think I am being clear. The only one thing positive I see about this has been touched already, which is the idea that we are letting the kids know how creepy and jackassery the society at large will be against them, by giving them the living example of their own school spying on them. They will be taught that the society we are building is **** and doesn't take anything about you to be private, unless it's something you hide inside your brain to anyone else. They will learn by themselves to cope with the new reality instead of being thrown to the sharks when they get out of school.
It's not a beautiful thing. It's more a "Let's beat up the kids so they don't get such pussies when they get out" kinda of education.
I'm getting annoyed that I have to keep repeating myself. I am not in favour of this school policy; I merely point out that a number of the earlier arguments against it (pages 1 and 2, primarily) are/were quite weak.
I wasn't reading your words like that, and for that I apologize!
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Everyone has broken the law at some point.
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Seriously, go check out some of the insanely dumb laws that are still in place around the world. In some states in the US, it's still illegal to have sex in any position but missionary.
These laws aren't enforced, because everyone knows that they're dumb, but they still technically COULD be enforced if one was so inclined.
Naw, I was just thinking about how I was born Catholic and because I haven't reported into the church recently I'm considered AWOL by God...
Laws should really have expiration dates...
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Everyone has broken the law at some point.
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Seriously, go check out some of the insanely dumb laws that are still in place around the world. In some states in the US, it's still illegal to have sex in any position but missionary.
These laws aren't enforced, because everyone knows that they're dumb, but they still technically COULD be enforced if one was so inclined.
You don't want to seriously say anyone would be willing to enforce such dumb, outdated laws, right? Aside from lawyers really well versed in the particular state law, hardly anybody even knows about their existence. There should be a system for clearing off those absurds, but since there isn't, everyone, including the law enforcement and federal government simply ignore them. An overzealous cop wanting to fine someone for having sex in a weird position would be laughed off, and if the issue went to court (as improbable as it is), the law would be swiftly removed.
In this light, you'd be technically right saying "almost everybody has broken the law at some point", but it'd be meaningless, since for most people, the law in question is forgotten anyway, and for a good reason. I haven't heard of any recent case where such a "quirk law" came up and was seriously considered.
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You don't want to seriously say anyone would be willing to enforce such dumb, outdated laws, right? Aside from lawyers really well versed in the particular state law, hardly anybody even knows about their existence. There should be a system for clearing off those absurds, but since there isn't, everyone, including the law enforcement and federal government simply ignore them. An overzealous cop wanting to fine someone for having sex in a weird position would be laughed off, and if the issue went to court (as improbable as it is), the law would be swiftly removed.
This isn't the way things work in practice. There are many cases where certain cops have grudges against certain people and use these laws to basically harass those people. If the charges get dropped or not is also about who you know not how stupid or archaic the law is. Things like spitting, j-walking (not ever enforced around here and there aren't even any crosswalks), parking distance from a curb, drinking alcohol in your own yard because it is visible from a public street (although legal if it's your back yard).... There are many examples.
Also these things come up in court cases. One of the more famous ones was a case where a husband was on trial and admitted to preforming oral sex on his wife while on the stand. He won the case he was being tried for but was sentenced to something like 20 years because the oral sex was against state law and he confessed under oath. Yes this was recent case (probably a bit longer then I think but something like in the last 10 years).
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You don't want to seriously say anyone would be willing to enforce such dumb, outdated laws, right? Aside from lawyers really well versed in the particular state law, hardly anybody even knows about their existence. There should be a system for clearing off those absurds, but since there isn't, everyone, including the law enforcement and federal government simply ignore them. An overzealous cop wanting to fine someone for having sex in a weird position would be laughed off, and if the issue went to court (as improbable as it is), the law would be swiftly removed.
This isn't the way things work in practice. There are many cases where certain cops have grudges against certain people and use these laws to basically harass those people. If the charges get dropped or not is also about who you know not how stupid or archaic the law is. Things like spitting, j-walking (not ever enforced around here and there aren't even any crosswalks), parking distance from a curb, drinking alcohol in your own yard because it is visible from a public street (although legal if it's your back yard).... There are many examples.
Also these things come up in court cases. One of the more famous ones was a case where a husband was on trial and admitted to preforming oral sex on his wife while on the stand. He won the case he was being tried for but was sentenced to something like 20 years because the oral sex was against state law and he confessed under oath. Yes this was recent case (probably a bit longer then I think but something like in the last 10 years).
Yeah, this is the unfortunate truth. It only takes one power-mad, angry, bitter, petty, or otherwise malicious person with far too much time on their hands to destroy the integrity of...well, whatever the intention of this whole thing is. And adults can be very, VERY petty. Especially when kids are involved. What happens when someone in charge of the monitoring gets in an argument with a parent? The kid might as well drop out and check themselves into juvie, because they're done.
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Popular sentiment is not evidence, Luis. Furthermore, this school policy is not a law. Indeed, the potential for abuse of voluntarily and publicly posted information collected from public spaces is pretty much zero. Your right to privacy for publicly-shared information is zero.
Really?
When you are out in public, anyone who knows you can see your face and recognise you. You've chosen to leave your house and therefore you have no right to assume you won't be noticed. What you are arguing is that this fact makes it perfectly acceptable for the police to track everyone in the country using facial recognition software. Or for a private company to do the same thing.
There is a difference between state-run surveillance programs and publicly-available information, and the courts generally recognize this.
As I've said several times, the courts acknowledge that privacy rights fall on a continuum of privacy interest. When you post something publicly online or shout it publicly on a street, you make that information available to anyone who wants to see it, hear it, collect it. There is nothing preventing anyone from collecting that sort of information - but once they do collect it it does attract certain privacy requirements when collated and organized into a file or database, particularly if collected by government.
That's information.
When it comes to people's movements, the courts acknowledge that people expect a certain degree of anonymity; thus, widespread use of surveillance and facial-recognition software by a police or other government-affiliated organization is unlikely to pass muster as it rapidly becomes a means of accessing private information. Where you are at any given moment in public is not private information - a passing police officer can record that in their notes at will. Where it attracts privacy interest is when a series of such observations are used to form a record of a person's movements. While you can have no expectation of privacy concerning your presence at discrete points in public, you can have a limited expectation of privacy concerning your general movements and records of them.
However - the UK has widespread CCTV already. It doesn't run afoul of privacy law. Police organizations routinely conduct surveillance without warrant - they can legally follow and record a person of interest in public wherever they go. That doesn't run afoul of privacy law. Private investigators can do the same thing. You can take a picture of anyone you like in public too. While people think their right to privacy is absolute, in public spaces you have virtually no privacy interest concerning anything that is readily visible or audible to anyone else around you.
Concerning widespread video surveillance and facial recognition software, the privacy interest is triggered not during collection of information, but after recording - those records in the possession of whomever monitors and reviews it is subject to certain privacy considerations (for government agencies). This is because there is inherently private information in facial-recognition databases. That said, any private business is free to film the street outside their entrance and install facial-recognition software, though why they'd want to I have no idea.
As in the case with school board, the best way to oppose practices like this is not dubious legal claims, but political pressure on the decision makers. Or get your legislative body to pass a law explicitly limiting it.
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One of the more famous ones was a case where a husband was on trial and admitted to preforming oral sex on his wife while on the stand. He won the case he was being tried for but was sentenced to something like 20 years because the oral sex was against state law and he confessed under oath. Yes this was recent case (probably a bit longer then I think but something like in the last 10 years).
I don't dispute that there are a number of very questionable laws still on the books, but you're going to have to provide a citation for something as hyperbolic as that. Sex offences of that nature have never had sentences approaching anywhere near that kind of length. Furthermore, many democracies actually don't allow testimony made under oath to be used against you in other proceedings except for perjury.
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Yeah, it seems very strange to me, too. Could you link to the case or something? It seems very suspicious that an ancient law prohibiting oral sex would get someone a sentence normally issued for murders. It's conceivable that such a sentence could've happened for other reasons (say, a corrupt judge), but even then, I'm convinced it wouldn't survive an appeal.
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One of the more famous ones was a case where a husband was on trial and admitted to preforming oral sex on his wife while on the stand. He won the case he was being tried for but was sentenced to something like 20 years because the oral sex was against state law and he confessed under oath. Yes this was recent case (probably a bit longer then I think but something like in the last 10 years).
I don't dispute that there are a number of very questionable laws still on the books, but you're going to have to provide a citation for something as hyperbolic as that. Sex offences of that nature have never had sentences approaching anywhere near that kind of length. Furthermore, many democracies actually don't allow testimony made under oath to be used against you in other proceedings except for perjury.
Guess it was longer ago then I thought (damn I'm getting old) but here is a link about the case: http://www.tinadupuy.com/column/legalized-oral-sex-sodomy-and-immoral-prosecutions/
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Indeed, quite a long time ago. A lot has changed since '88. In particular, that law was ruled unconstitutional (in 2003). Back then, 5 years for sodomy was, from what I recall, a pretty normal sentence. The 80s were still pretty prudish, despite all the liberalization that's been going on. Of course, I'm not saying it's all right, but there's more to it than just an old, silly law.
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Indeed. And its worth pointing out another common error in the media and public consciousness: the maximum sentence is not what a person typically receives. That is determined by case law precedent. In that [ancient] case, the max was 20 years, the actual sentence was 5 years, and time served was 18 months. Still ridiculous, but that just goes to show how ridiculous 'moral' laws are.
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Yeah. The maximum sentence is usually reserved for especially heinous cases of a crime. I fail to see how oral sex could be heinous enough to warrant 20 years, but considering when the law was probably made, it probably wouldn't have taken much. Back then, there were more laws like that, and a lot of very racist ones, too. Never underestimate what 25 years can do. Moral laws like that always look ridiculous if looked on from a more enlightened time. It's amazing that this changed from "all right" to "silly" in just 25 years. Who knows, maybe in the next 25 years, our children will be saying the same things about fines for public nudity or jailing people for smoking weed.
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Concerning widespread video surveillance and facial recognition software, the privacy interest is triggered not during collection of information, but after recording - those records in the possession of whomever monitors and reviews it is subject to certain privacy considerations (for government agencies). This is because there is inherently private information in facial-recognition databases. That said, any private business is free to film the street outside their entrance and install facial-recognition software, though why they'd want to I have no idea.
I can think of several reasons. 20 years ago people might have asked why a company might want to read your mail. Google has become a multi-billion dollar company simply from knowing which websites you visit and what you talk about in your mail. You really think advertisers wouldn't want targeted data on which people shop in which shops? You really think that a company offering this sort of service at a reasonable price wouldn't become very rich, very quickly? I suspect it's only the cost that stops certain areas like shopping malls doing this now. But as good cameras and software become available I suspect it will become more likely.
As in the case with school board, the best way to oppose practices like this is not dubious legal claims, but political pressure on the decision makers. Or get your legislative body to pass a law explicitly limiting it.
I don't disagree with that at all. It's your assertion that publicly available data can't be abused that I disagree with. You spent half your last post pointing out why there are government limits to prevent them abusing a similar situation. Why are you so certain that publicly available data can't be abused?
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I can think of several reasons. 20 years ago people might have asked why a company might want to read your mail. Google has become a multi-billion dollar company simply from knowing which websites you visit and what you talk about in your mail. You really think advertisers wouldn't want targeted data on which people shop in which shops? You really think that a company offering this sort of service at a reasonable price wouldn't become very rich, very quickly? I suspect it's only the cost that stops certain areas like shopping malls doing this now. But as good cameras and software become available I suspect it will become more likely.
And it's inherently possible under the current legal framework. Time to start lobbying governments.
I don't disagree with that at all. It's your assertion that publicly available data can't be abused that I disagree with. You spent half your last post pointing out why there are government limits to prevent them abusing a similar situation. Why are you so certain that publicly available data can't be abused?
It's the situation with the school board in particular that I'm talking about. If someone puts information in the public sphere, they should anticipate other people will see it. If there is the potential for abuse of that information, then the problem lies squarely with the person who put that information out there to begin with. Putting potentially self-compromising information in the public domain is a really stupid thing to do; a lesson which not enough parents, nevermind their offspring, don't seem to understand. Making policies like this school board's known are actually a really good prompt for people to educate themselves.
Perhaps I should have said to Luis earlier that the potential for abuse SHOULD be zero because we should expect that people are not posting compromising details in public. Of course, we all know that people in general are stupid and that a lot of people have posted compromising information in public, but I have trouble with the idea of consequences of that posting resulting from school board collection being 'abuse.' It's like the various idiots who post racist/misogynist/homophobic rants publicly on Twitter and facebook - sure, collecting, reproducing, and mocking them for that information is technically 'abuse' - but the victim is totally the architect of their own misfortune and I don't have much sympathy.
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I love how you're blaming the victim here. Especially when the victim is someone who is most likely a minor and could be as young as 11 or so.
Yeah, it's their fault when the system gets abused.
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MP, please remember these are not adults we're talking about. They're not helpless, but a lot of them are growing up in a culture of over-sharing and they think that it's completely normal, and that us old codgers shaking our walking sticks at them yelling at clouds about "privacy" are dinosaurs trapped in the past. They're wrong, but letting them reap the consequences of ignorance in a Darwinian atmosphere just doesn't sit right with me when we're talking about mostly teenagers who have a lot of things to worry about.
They need to learn that privacy is important, yes, but not by letting a bunch of them get thrown in juvie and having their lives ruined over misunderstandings blown completely out of proportion by power-mad adults enabled by the mass hysteria of helicopter parents.
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Yes, even in adults that particular idea is ridiculous. It is literally the old classic "If you have nothing to hide what's your problem?"
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Yes, even in adults that particular idea is ridiculous. It is literally the old classic "If you have nothing to hide what's your problem?"
Except it's not, because this information is as easily available as if you walked next to a person yelling at the top of their lungs down a street.
The point is, like the policy or not, there is absolutely nothing that is stopping anyone, even a school board, from monitoring these people's social media posts. And there can never be a law in a democratic society making that illegal, either.
So, much as I wouldn't be terribly comfortable with a school board monitoring my kids' posts, I'm much more worried about my kid posting stuff he shouldn't be. So responsibility for NOT being a victim here lies with the person doing the posting. Unlike crimes like sexual assault, where victims have no fault role in the crime, any abuse of personal information in this case is preventable entirely by the person not posting it for all the world to see. Sure, criminal charges exist for people who commit offenses using other people's information, public or not, and the victim in that case is not responsible for the criminal actions of another. But in general - if you don't want to be a victim of abuse, don't post information that can be used to abuse you in public. Yeah, these kids are young, but this is a lesson that parents should be imparting early (and recall that the TOU for these sites set minimum age at 13 with parental monitoring). If anything, a school board is one of the most benign parties that can be collecting this information.
Does the school board policy suck? Sure. Should it be opposed by the parents with kids in that district? Yup. However, if the school board refuses to retract the policy, there is an eminently simple solution:
Teach your kids that they should never post anything in the public areas of the Internet that can be used to harm or compromise them. If anything, the argument that "parents don't properly monitor the information their kids put online and it can therefore be abused" is a pretty reasonable justification for a policy like this simply because parents clearly aren't monitoring their kids at all in that case.
I hate the argument that "people no longer feel any sense of personal responsibility," but there are a small few areas where that really has become the reality, and the **** people post on the Internet is at the top of the list.
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If anything, a school board is one of the most benign parties that can be collecting this information.
Just a quick aside: the school board in the original post's article actually hired a third-party contractor for the monitoring. I don't know if that changes anything for you, but third-party contractors hired for just about anything have a very long history of a complete lack of any kind of oversight.
You're absolutely right about the first and best option being to educate people about the consequences of sharing too much personal information in public forums. But you know who has to do that?
Me.
You. Pretty much anyone else in this thread.
We know the dangers. It's on us.
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MP-Ryan is also ignoring the fact that fairly innocuous data can be abused if you have enough of it.
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MP, nothing you said in that above comment is remotely relevant. Yes, parents should teach as best as they can to their kids about life and its pitfalls and how to deal with the internet, etc.
Yes, anyone *can* legally do this, etc.
The question is not *Can they?* but *Should they*. I never brought up the *can* aspect, and I was always damned clear about this, so why you keep bringing it up is beyond me. Especially when you then go all the way to agree with us:
Does the school board policy suck? Sure. Should it be opposed by the parents with kids in that district? Yup.
Ok, I think I've had enough of this carroucel. My head is spinning.
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The point is, like the policy or not, there is absolutely nothing that is stopping anyone, even a school board, from monitoring these people's social media posts. And there can never be a law in a democratic society making that illegal, either.
If it is a public school, then it means that voters or politicians hold some authority over the school. Thus they can establish some law or local regulation to prevent public schools from monitoring or punishing kids for online posts. And it would not be "undemocratic".
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The point is, like the policy or not, there is absolutely nothing that is stopping anyone, even a school board, from monitoring these people's social media posts. And there can never be a law in a democratic society making that illegal, either.
If it is a public school, then it means that voters or politicians hold some authority over the school. Thus they can establish some law or local regulation to prevent public schools from monitoring or punishing kids for online posts. And it would not be "undemocratic".
Yeah, poor choice of words on my part. There cannot be a general law against data collection from public realms of the Internet (which is what I was driving at), but you are correct that school boards in particular answer to both voters and local legislatures; they could be blocked via budgetary or legislative means.
MP-Ryan is also ignoring the fact that fairly innocuous data can be abused if you have enough of it.
No, I'm saying that if people took responsibility for their digital citizenship then the actual abuse that can come out of innocuous data is more or less nothing. I would expect this would be the case for most HLP users - you could assemble some general facts about us, but really not anything that can be abused in any way.
The question is not *Can they?* but *Should they*. I never brought up the *can* aspect, and I was always damned clear about this, so why you keep bringing it up is beyond me. Especially when you then go all the way to agree with us:
You are not the only person I've been responding to. Yes, I agree that the policy is one that should be opposed, just not on legal grounds, and the 'abuse' argument is a pretty thin one. Much better to avoid the inevitable argument with something like "I elected you to run the school under a responsible budget; if you want to spend money on things that don't fall within your mandate, then I'm going to elect someone else." A few hundred/thousand angry parents saying that to the school board will get ridiculous policies like this eliminated in short order. And if they don't, then the next election will.
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And once again you ignore the fact that we're dealing with children as young as 11 and not adults. Since when has any problem caused by children gone away completely by simply by having adults tell them what to do? Expecting 11 year olds to act responsibly is a basic denial of what an 11 year old is. Sure the parent has to exercise some responsibility since their children can't, but expecting this problem to go away simply by telling children what they should and shouldn't do online is such a naive view of how parenting works that I'm amazed you can express it.
And that's if I even agree with you that you can't abuse even fairly innocuous sounding comments. Not to mention that you're also forgetting that you're also going to have to edit anything said before people knew their children would have their posts data mined. In the case of the older kids that's several years worth of posts that need to be edited or removed.
This isn't an issue that needs to be (or even can be) solved by the parents, except by getting themselves a less idiotic school board.
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Not only that but you have to watch what everyone else is saying about your kids. It would be very easy for other kids to turn this system around. Get your friends together and start a rumor about someone you don't like and if enough hits come up about that rumor now you have an innocent kid that is in trouble.
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So even MP-Ryan doesn't like the idea.
I guess I'm the only one who'd be happy to roll the dice. I think it would do more good than harm. For every abuser you'd have a whole bunch of good people who would do good things.
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So even MP-Ryan doesn't like the idea.
I guess I'm the only one who'd be happy to roll the dice. I think it would do more good than harm. For every abuser you'd have a whole bunch of good people who would do good things.
Unfortunately, good people doing good things are in the minority. For every time something good comes out of this, I predict several scandals where the third-party contractors hired to do this wind up being caught selling all their data to advertisers or with loads of pictures they've taken from remote webcam access of 13 year old girls in their underwear.
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Unfortunately, good people doing good things are in the minority.
I think it's the other way around.
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Yeah. Despite everything, most regular people are not assholes. It's merely that it's assholes who are most often reported on. Afterall, "A system operator came to job today and browsed Facebook for 6 hours." isn't exactly an exciting headline, especially since that's what most people do at work anyway. :) But if you've got a scandal, people will want to read about that. People tend to forget that for every asshole that makes the news, there are millions of decent people who don't.
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Yeah. Despite everything, most regular people are not assholes. It's merely that it's assholes who are most often reported on. Afterall, "A system operator came to job today and browsed Facebook for 6 hours." isn't exactly an exciting headline, especially since that's what most people do at work anyway. :) But if you've got a scandal, people will want to read about that. People tend to forget that for every asshole that makes the news, there are millions of decent people who don't.
Yes. So many cynics around here. I may make a thread on it one day, the amount of cynicism on HLP disturbs me.
Forget about the media. Look at your own lives, people. How much bad stuff do you actually see with your own eyes compared to good stuff?
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That particular statistic is irrelevant and immaterial. It matters not one bolt if the percentage of "good" people is 10% or 95%. What matters is that there's at least 5% who will abuse this kind of material. And if the company who holds this data is composed of at least 20 people, the chances there's at least one big asshole who will abuse this kind of thing to his advantage, or that there will be kids who will take advantage of this system, or ETC., is pretty high.
Systems must be designed with an architecture that is "jackass-proof", in a kind of an "anti-fragile" way. To simply assume goodwill of strangers is *not* good policy, it's naiveté at best, absolute incompetence and idiocy at worst.
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Unfortunately, good people doing good things are in the minority.
I think it's the other way around.
It. Doesn't. Matter.
What is this surveillance regime going to do?
Effectively stalk a bunch of underage kids on the off chance that the people doing the stalking can find and head off instances of cyber bullying.
Who is going to do the stalking?
A bunch of people of unknown proficiency and unknown personal predilections.
Bottom Line: Since we cannot vet the people doing the surveillance, and since it's rather unlikely that this will have many positive effects (Here's a hint: If Facebook et al are known to be surveilled, what do you think are the kids who are even slightly clued up about this going to do? What happens as soon as the cyberbullying switches to private forms of communication this surveillance apparatus is unable to cover?), why do you believe it's a good idea?
There are many analogies one could make in regards to this kind of overzealous reaction to some perceived danger to kids, but they're unnecessary, really. The reason behind this thing is the desire of some parents that their kids be safe all the time, and the reaction of the school board to that. The reason why this is bad because it's a desire that is fundamentally impossible to fulfill, and might in fact just endanger the people it is supposed to be helping. Think about it: Now that this program is in place, how many weeks and months of back-padding and self-congratulatory behaviour is going to ensue until it turns out that it kids are still bullying each other over these newfangled devices?
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That particular statistic is irrelevant and immaterial. It matters not one bolt if the percentage of "good" people is 10% or 95%. What matters is that there's at least 5% who will abuse this kind of material. And if the company who holds this data is composed of at least 20 people, the chances there's at least one big asshole who will abuse this kind of thing to his advantage, or that there will be kids who will take advantage of this system, or ETC., is pretty high.
Systems must be designed with an architecture that is "jackass-proof", in a kind of an "anti-fragile" way. To simply assume goodwill of strangers is *not* good policy, it's naiveté at best, absolute incompetence and idiocy at worst.
There is no foolproof system. There are bent cops, bent doctors and bent teachers. But the good outweighs the bad.
What is this surveillance regime going to do?
Effectively stalk a bunch of underage kids on the off chance that the people doing the stalking can find and head off instances of cyber bullying.
Who is going to do the stalking?
A bunch of people of unknown proficiency and unknown personal predilections.
Bottom Line: Since we cannot vet the people doing the surveillance, and since it's rather unlikely that this will have many positive effects (Here's a hint: If Facebook et al are known to be surveilled, what do you think are the kids who are even slightly clued up about this going to do? What happens as soon as the cyberbullying switches to private forms of communication this surveillance apparatus is unable to cover?), why do you believe it's a good idea?
There are many analogies one could make in regards to this kind of overzealous reaction to some perceived danger to kids, but they're unnecessary, really. The reason behind this thing is the desire of some parents that their kids be safe all the time, and the reaction of the school board to that. The reason why this is bad because it's a desire that is fundamentally impossible to fulfill, and might in fact just endanger the people it is supposed to be helping. Think about it: Now that this program is in place, how many weeks and months of back-padding and self-congratulatory behaviour is going to ensue until it turns out that it kids are still bullying each other over these newfangled devices?
They're not going to hire Joe Schmoe. It will be the best for the job out of dozens of applicants.
Private communication can be blocked. Public is there for everyone to see.
Bullying is on the rise. It needs to be clamped down on.
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lorric you have surely just been or are in school, how the hell do you get this idea that the only people they'd hire are unfailingly responsible and benevolent
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That particular statistic is irrelevant and immaterial. It matters not one bolt if the percentage of "good" people is 10% or 95%. What matters is that there's at least 5% who will abuse this kind of material. And if the company who holds this data is composed of at least 20 people, the chances there's at least one big asshole who will abuse this kind of thing to his advantage, or that there will be kids who will take advantage of this system, or ETC., is pretty high.
Systems must be designed with an architecture that is "jackass-proof", in a kind of an "anti-fragile" way. To simply assume goodwill of strangers is *not* good policy, it's naiveté at best, absolute incompetence and idiocy at worst.
Thank you.
Yes, bullying is tragic, but we already have rules in place to prevent it. The same parents that are crying about it are the ones that will storm into the school offices screaming when their precious little snowflake gets disciplined, and they're the ones completely undermining the authority of the teachers and administrators, preventing them from consistently enforcing the rules. Telling these helicopter parents that their child is not special and is subject to the same rules and punishments as anyone else and if they don't like it to go pound sand is a cheaper and more effective solution than hiring some incredibly shady contractor to spy on the kids.
A lot of people seem to be forgetting how things like this work anyway. This /might/ work for a short amount of time, and then, the kids will adapt and it will just be throwing money down the drain. Nobody in the high school age range uses most of the sites on that list anyway (source: I have a high-school age sibling who is unfathomably "popular," and thus I get to see a pretty good cross-section of the high school mindset), the "popular" things are Vine and Snapchat.
Lorric, it's nice that you haven't gotten bitter and jaded, but believing that no one will abuse the information they collect is the SAME ARGUMENT that people are making in this thread about why you shouldn't put any personal information online. It will get abused, end of story.
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They're not going to hire Joe Schmoe. It will be the best for the job out of dozens of applicants.
Are you sure of that? See, the thing is, there are companies out there that basically provide forum moderators for hire. These poor souls have to wade through page after page of what humanity ****s out onto the internet. Do you know how long these people last before they're burnt out? Before they go on to a job that won't destroy their souls and whatever faith in humanity they have left? The answer is, not very long. They rely on workers that they can hire quickly and let go quickly, not trained professionals.
Even if the companies have a list of social media profiles to work through (And what are the chances of such a list being complete?), how much are they really going to see? What happens if the kids decide to abandon the standard social networks?
Private communication can be blocked. Public is there for everyone to see.
Yes, but cyberbullying is not restricted to messaging. Hate posts and character assassination pieces can be posted anonymously, and since these people can only flag stuff for the attention of school authorities, their ability to police these things before they become acute problems is sharply limited.
Bullying is on the rise. It needs to be clamped down on.
I don't disagree with this, but is it necessary to put everyone under surveillance because a few people misbehave?
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I didn't say "foolproof", Lorric. I said "anti-fragile". Look it up. It means a system that is characterized by a tendency to improve itself up and fail to the least damaging side, not the worst side.
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They're not going to hire Joe Schmoe. It will be the best for the job out of dozens of applicants.
No they are going to outsource it to the cheapest source that will do the job.
Direct quote from the company via CNN.
To do the work, Frydrych employs no more than 10 full-time staffers -- as well as "a larger portion" of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of four hours a day because "the content they read is so dark and heavy," Frydrych said.
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Are you sure of that? See, the thing is, there are companies out there that basically provide forum moderators for hire. These poor souls have to wade through page after page of what humanity ****s out onto the internet. Do you know how long these people last before they're burnt out? Before they go on to a job that won't destroy their souls and whatever faith in humanity they have left? The answer is, not very long. They rely on workers that they can hire quickly and let go quickly, not trained professionals.
Even if the companies have a list of social media profiles to work through (And what are the chances of such a list being complete?), how much are they really going to see? What happens if the kids decide to abandon the standard social networks?
I remember the Facebook mod topic. I think it was on here. But this would not be on such a scale, a big school has like 1000-2000 pupils. Not all of these will have internet access or be bothered about online socialising. A load more simply won't be flagged up by the software. The way I'd imagine it going would be they look into individuals flagged up by the software and be asked to investigate certain individuals by the school. The workload wouldn't be that huge.
Yes, but cyberbullying is not restricted to messaging. Hate posts and character assassination pieces can be posted anonymously, and since these people can only flag stuff for the attention of school authorities, their ability to police these things before they become acute problems is sharply limited.
It's not a foolproof system by any means, and there probably isn't such a thing. But it's surely much better than nothing. It would still catch people out and make bullies have to work harder and cut down their options. If they have to bully off the main sites, the effectiveness of said bullying will be reduced. A lot of bullies are idiots as well, they'd fall into the traps.
I don't disagree with this, but is it necessary to put everyone under surveillance because a few people misbehave?
Even though everyone is, I'm sure in reality it won't be like that. Human eyes will never see the majority of the students' online profiles.
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I remember the Facebook mod topic. I think it was on here. But this would not be on such a scale, a big school has like 1000-2000 pupils. Not all of these will have internet access or be bothered about online socialising. A load more simply won't be flagged up by the software. The way I'd imagine it going would be they look into individuals flagged up by the software and be asked to investigate certain individuals by the school. The workload wouldn't be that huge.
That does not sound like the system they've described here. It would also be even more useless, since you cannot make an algorithmic determination of whether a given post is bullying or not. You can flag keywords, but you're still going to have to deal with stuff that is mostly irrelevant.
It's not a foolproof system by any means, and there probably isn't such a thing. But it's surely much better than nothing. It would still catch people out and make bullies have to work harder and cut down their options. If they have to bully off the main sites, the effectiveness of said bullying will be reduced. A lot of bullies are idiots as well, they'd fall into the traps.
That's a lot of wishful thinking. If a kid wants to hurt another, he or she will find a way to do so. Never underestimate the inventiveness of kids.
Even though everyone is, I'm sure in reality it won't be like that. Human eyes will never see the majority of the students' online profiles.
That is not the point. Haven't you followed the public debate about overly broad NSA/GCHQ/<insert spy agency here> surveillance at all?
Even if 99% of this surveillance is automated (which it can't be, because we cannot find algorithms to filter something as hazily defined as bullying), you're still talking about having a bunch of people paid to trawl through children's social media activity for signs of unwanted behaviours.
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It's not a foolproof system by any means, and there probably isn't such a thing. But it's surely much better than nothing. It would still catch people out and make bullies have to work harder and cut down their options. If they have to bully off the main sites, the effectiveness of said bullying will be reduced. A lot of bullies are idiots as well, they'd fall into the traps.
That's a lot of wishful thinking. If a kid wants to hurt another, he or she will find a way to do so. Never underestimate the inventiveness of kids.
just like how if a criminal wants a gun they will find one, thereby rendering gun control pointless?
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just like how if a criminal wants a gun they will find one, thereby rendering gun control pointless?
oh that's a cheap shot right there. Which, I am aware, is what I was making too. (Not that your point is entirely relevant or correct in my opinion, but I would ask that we keep that particular discussin out of this one)
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Yes please, before Nakura gets a chance of detecting it.
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That does not sound like the system they've described here. It would also be even more useless, since you cannot make an algorithmic determination of whether a given post is bullying or not. You can flag keywords, but you're still going to have to deal with stuff that is mostly irrelevant.
I see where I've gone wrong here. The very first paragraph:
The Glendale School District in California is facing some backlash from the recent news that it has retained the services of Geo Listening to track its students' social media activity. The rationale behind the program is (of course) the students' safety.
"Geo Listening" sounds like a software program. And when they said "program" in the paragraph, I took it to mean it was a program. But it's actually a company, there's a link there in that paragraph, but I never clicked it on the first read. So sorry about that. This link:
http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp-me-monitoring-20130824,0,4640365.story
Back to the original though, look at all this, it still sounds like a program the way this is written out. Kind of amusing really. I was feeling rather embarrassed after that first paragraph, but after reading this again, not anymore. :)
What Geo Listening appears to do is nothing more than aggregate public social media posts linked to either the students or school district. Geo Listening repeatedly points out that it doesn't "monitor email, SMS, MMS, phone calls, voicemails or unlock any privacy setting of a social network user."
This seems to be true, but not necessarily because Geo Listening is concerned about privacy. In its privacy policy, it breaks down exactly what it does monitor.
Geo Listening is a social media monitoring system that allows school districts to locate and process publicly available social media content. School districts use the Geo Listening Services to access and aggregate publicly available content on the Internet into regular reports and dashboards. Public content is collected and provided to school districts from the following websites:
· Twitter;
· Facebook;
· Instagram;
· Picasa;
· Vine;
· Flickr;
· Ask.fm;
· YouTube; and
· Google+.
By monitoring only public posts on social media services, Geo Listening is able to provide the district with reports on 13,000 students. Without having access to a report, it's tough to say exactly what Geo Listening is turning over to the district. Here's what it says it's looking for:
Geo Listening provides social media monitoring services (“Geo Listening Services”) that enable school districts to locate and process publicly available information about their students for the purposes of combating bullying, cyber-bullying, hate and shaming activities, depression, harm and self harm, self hate and suicide, crime, vandalism, substance abuse and truancy.
There are some very broad terms in that list and without more information on how Geo Listening tracks or aggregates posts that fall into this very wide net, it looks as though the system is apt to produce a lot of false positives.
Then there's the question about how it searches for offending posts. Does it only run current students through its digital sifter or does it include anyone who lists a Glendale school on their profile? Does this dragnet also capture comments, tweets, etc. from non-students who interact with Glendale students? If a student interacts with a non-student's post that falls afoul of the guidelines, can they be punished? These are just a few of the many questions this monitoring service raises.
But what it actually is sounds better to me, as it does to you. Because the reality is some kids don't report bullying, and sometimes the first the parents know about it is when they find their kid hanging from a rope.
That's a lot of wishful thinking. If a kid wants to hurt another, he or she will find a way to do so. Never underestimate the inventiveness of kids.
Oh yes. But it will stop some.
That is not the point. Haven't you followed the public debate about overly broad NSA/GCHQ/<insert spy agency here> surveillance at all?
Even if 99% of this surveillance is automated (which it can't be, because we cannot find algorithms to filter something as hazily defined as bullying), you're still talking about having a bunch of people paid to trawl through children's social media activity for signs of unwanted behaviours.
I just think it's acceptable risk vs reward.
Schools I went to didn't give a crap about bullying. Bullies basically got to do whatever they wanted.
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As far as I'm concerned, it's Facebook's job to keep bullying and harassment in check on Facebook. Schools generally aren't responsible for student's activities that are unaffiliated with the school, so I don't see why they should worry about Facebook. I certainly didn't expect my teachers to intervene when I made an ass of myself on here when I was in middle school. They have plenty of other things they should be doing with the money they're spending on this.
Because the reality is some kids don't report bullying, and sometimes the first the parents know about it is when they find their kid hanging from a rope.
I would rather teach kids how to deal with bullies than nanny them.
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I would rather teach kids how to deal with bullies than nanny them.
Oh really? And how exactly would you do that?
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I would rather teach kids how to deal with bullies than nanny them.
Oh really? And how exactly would you do that?
You seem to be under the impression that kids are mindless idiots. It's not difficult blocking and reporting someone on social networks; rest assured, they can handle it.
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I would rather teach kids how to deal with bullies than nanny them.
Oh really? And how exactly would you do that?
You seem to be under the impression that kids are mindless idiots. It's not difficult blocking and reporting someone on social networks; rest assured, they can handle it.
Not that easy if they go on a campaign and turn everyone against someone.
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Yet it's far easier than having the student's school hire a contractor to watch everyone and punish accordingly...
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Yet it's far easier than having the student's school hire a contractor to watch everyone and punish accordingly...
I don't think so. Plenty of parents don't care. Plenty of parents have no clue how these things work.
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I don't think so. Plenty of parents don't care. Plenty of parents have no clue how these things work.
This is true, and also irrelevant.
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irrelevant.
No it's not.
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irrelevant.
No it's not.
I do not think think people are more likely to know how maintain surveillance on a school district's worth of students across a battery of social networks than they are to know how to block and report people.
edit: Furthermore, the parents don't need to know anything about this. Basic internet usage (read: blocking people on social networks) could (and should) be part of your student's typical computer course.
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irrelevant.
No it's not.
I do not think think people are more likely to know how maintain surveillance on a school district's worth of students across a battery of social networks than they are to know how to block and report people.
Blocking and reporting alone won't solve the problem.
Even if you could make every kid understand, plenty would still engage with the bullies.
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Blocking and reporting alone won't solve the problem.
Even if you could make every kid understand, plenty would still engage with the bullies.
And that's their prerogative. All schools should be expected to do to combat online bullying is 1) properly moderate whatever school network they host, and 2) teach kids that they don't need to engage with bullies and provide them the knowledge and ability to do so.
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Blocking and reporting alone won't solve the problem.
Even if you could make every kid understand, plenty would still engage with the bullies.
And that's their prerogative. All schools should be expected to do to combat online bullying is 1) properly moderate whatever school network they host, and 2) teach kids that they don't need to engage with bullies and provide them the knowledge and ability to do so.
Well I think you'd need to do a lot more than say "block and report." But prevention is always better than cure.
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Well I think you'd need to do a lot more than say "block and report."
Obviously, but if you expect me to write up lesson plans I concede defeat right now.
But prevention is always better than cure.
So you'd advocate combating the problems that lead to bullying, and not spying on students in an effort to stem bullying? Good, that's all something that school should be tackling to begin with.
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Well I think you'd need to do a lot more than say "block and report."
Obviously, but if you expect me to write up lesson plans I concede defeat right now.
But prevention is always better than cure.
So you'd advocate combating the problems that lead to bullying, and not spying on students in an effort to stem bullying? Good, that's all something that school should be tackling to begin with.
The thing is I've never seen any kind of anti-bullying system on these lines. I've seen some isolated examples in single schools where they've somehow managed to get the kids to police themselves and deal with bullies themselves within schools, but these I'm sure require brilliant teachers. When you see the teachers talk, you can just see the passion they have for it, and that's unfortunately few and far between. Like I said earlier, the teachers didn't give a crap about bullying at my schools.
If you can get the kids to deal with the bullies themselves and give them the leeway to do it, that's the dream outcome imo. But at the same time, I don't think it's something you could create a system for to use in every school. The ones I saw where they did it, they gave certain responsibilities to certain kids, they became "buddies" that people could talk to who would help them, and an anti-bully mentality was instilled school-wide. The biggest obstacle to bullying is the "don't tell" culture that seems to exist in schools. Get rid of that and encourage everyone to go against the bullies and the bullies become the social outcasts, not their victims. But you need dedicated teachers to make a system like this work, to make the pupils believe in them and to choose the "buddies" correctly.
Cyber bullying, I've never seen a program of teaching the kids to deal with it before, which is why I wanted to know what you had in mind. Maybe it exists and I haven't seen it. But cyber bullying is still fairly new, and I get an impression people still don't really know how to deal with it. But get an effective prevention method going and I'll be behind it 100%. In the meantime, I'd rather see someone doing something than nothing.
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Well I think you'd need to do a lot more than say "block and report."
Obviously, but if you expect me to write up lesson plans I concede defeat right now.
But prevention is always better than cure.
So you'd advocate combating the problems that lead to bullying, and not spying on students in an effort to stem bullying? Good, that's all something that school should be tackling to begin with.
The thing is I've never seen any kind of anti-bullying system on these lines. I've seen some isolated examples in single schools where they've somehow managed to get the kids to police themselves and deal with bullies themselves within schools, but these I'm sure require brilliant teachers. When you see the teachers talk, you can just see the passion they have for it, and that's unfortunately few and far between. Like I said earlier, the teachers didn't give a crap about bullying at my schools.
Here's the problem (IMO) with your reasoning: the quality of teaching is declining, because when you pay bananas, you get monkeys. This "solution" from the article is schools wasting MORE money on stupid garbage like shady third-party contractors instead of paying the teachers what they deserve and letting them do their jobs.
More education is the best answer. Funneling money away from that is not a good move.
EDIT: and no, giving schools more money is not the answer because the root of their problem is criminal mismanagement of funding.
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2) teach kids that they don't need to engage with bullies and provide them the knowledge and ability to do so.
I found that not engaging with the bullies is actually something that doesn't work. Threatening to shoot them however, does
Nobody bullies a crazy person
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Here's the problem (IMO) with your reasoning: the quality of teaching is declining, because when you pay bananas, you get monkeys. This "solution" from the article is schools wasting MORE money on stupid garbage like shady third-party contractors instead of paying the teachers what they deserve and letting them do their jobs.
More education is the best answer. Funneling money away from that is not a good move.
EDIT: and no, giving schools more money is not the answer because the root of their problem is criminal mismanagement of funding.
I am skeptical about whether a boost on teacher salary would boost teacher quality. Because you need so many teachers. I would have thought most of those who either take pleasure in teaching or are talented at teaching would already be in the profession, with a few diamonds sprinkled in among the rocks at public education, and the rest gravitating to higher paid teaching jobs in higher and private education and anywhere else where they can offer more money. Raise the wage in a particular school and they'll be able to increase the level of the staff they hire. But a country-wide boost to public school teacher salary? Where's the extra quality going to come from? It might inspire a few extra people to take up the job, but I don't think it would have a meaningful impact.
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Here's the problem (IMO) with your reasoning: the quality of teaching is declining, because when you pay bananas, you get monkeys. This "solution" from the article is schools wasting MORE money on stupid garbage like shady third-party contractors instead of paying the teachers what they deserve and letting them do their jobs.
More education is the best answer. Funneling money away from that is not a good move.
EDIT: and no, giving schools more money is not the answer because the root of their problem is criminal mismanagement of funding.
I am skeptical about whether a boost on teacher salary would boost teacher quality. Because you need so many teachers. I would have thought most of those who either take pleasure in teaching or are talented at teaching would already be in the profession, with a few diamonds sprinkled in among the rocks at public education, and the rest gravitating to higher paid teaching jobs in higher and private education and anywhere else where they can offer more money. Raise the wage in a particular school and they'll be able to increase the level of the staff they hire. But a country-wide boost to public school teacher salary? Where's the extra quality going to come from? It might inspire a few extra people to take up the job, but I don't think it would have a meaningful impact.
I can guarantee that there is a significant number of people who would love to teach, and would be good at it, but cannot afford to because they need more money than teaching pays (and their skillset actually fetches that money, outside of a school environment).
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I wonder how you could ever know how many people there'd be and what impact they'd have.
What would be the best teacher salary vs. return on investment?
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I wonder how you could ever know how many people there'd be and what impact they'd have.
perhaps by having a broader experience and knowledge of life than a sheltered youth with no sense of perspective?
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And once again you ignore the fact that we're dealing with children as young as 11 and not adults. Since when has any problem caused by children gone away completely by simply by having adults tell them what to do? Expecting 11 year olds to act responsibly is a basic denial of what an 11 year old is. Sure the parent has to exercise some responsibility since their children can't, but expecting this problem to go away simply by telling children what they should and shouldn't do online is such a naive view of how parenting works that I'm amazed you can express it.
And that's if I even agree with you that you can't abuse even fairly innocuous sounding comments. Not to mention that you're also forgetting that you're also going to have to edit anything said before people knew their children would have their posts data mined. In the case of the older kids that's several years worth of posts that need to be edited or removed.
This isn't an issue that needs to be (or even can be) solved by the parents, except by getting themselves a less idiotic school board.
I was going to leave this be after the Lorric mess started, but after thinking about it for a while here I think it is worth responding to. Not because I think what you've said is necessarily wrong, but because it seems to reflect a significant difference of opinion.
You seem to be operating on the premise that these are young kids and therefore require careful handling because they know not what they do online. However, each and every single one of these social media sites have age of consent requirements, most of which are set at 13 (13 also happens to be 1 year after most democratic countries make kids criminally responsible for their actions). With parental consent.
I realize you are arguing pragmatically here - kids, like it or not, do not do what their parents tell them to and will create social media accounts, and really shouldn't be monitored by their school and experience social consequences for it. I, on the other hand, am arguing threefold: (1) young kids aren't actually legally allowed to have social media accounts without parental consent, (2) anyone who posts online should be fully prepared to experience social consequences of it, and (3) the social consequences really shouldn't be all that dire due to the nature of the information.
From a practical standpoint, if parents are not going to properly monitor their children online or offline, their children are going to readily feel the consequences of any unmonitored behaviour that crosses boundaries, be they social or criminal. Some people appear to think that consequences are right and just when these kids do stupid things offline, yet online behaviour should get a pass. I disagree. As I keep saying, anyone can collect this information this school board will be collecting it. Their peers will actually be a lot BETTER at collecting and using this information against a poster than will adults. The child is likely to experience more negative consequences from their posting behaviour at the hands of their peers than any school monitoring system. All of which goes back to the point that if parents leave their kids to their own devices, their kids are going to experience consequences of that. This isn't a bad thing - we accept it readily enough in the offline realm, yet somehow parents get absolved of responsibility when their children go online. Like it or not, until their child reaches age of majority, parents are responsible for the behaviour of their offspring - especially, I argue, their social media behaviour. And being a parent, that means I do everything in my means to make sure my little monsters don't get themselves in ****, whether or not I like having that responsibility. The "they're just kids" argument doesn't fly - kids have parents, parents are expected to obey the law (age of consent for social media) and be responsible for the actions of their kids. And if they don't, then their kids are going to experience the consequences of that, and ultimately the parents.
So, if a child feels the consequences of some inappropriate public posts, unless those consequences are themselves criminal or civil violations, they are precisely the fault of the party that put the information out there - the kid, and by legal extension, their parents - and that is as it should be. Just because they're kids doesn't mean they get a pass on the nastiness of the world in general, however unfortunate that reality may be. Better this lesson is learned in a relatively mild context than with life-altering consequences as an adult.
I don't agree with the school board policy, but I also very much disagree that this is not an issue that should or can be solved by parents. Parents have legal and moral responsibility for the actions of their children, regardless of how either party feels about that unfortunate reality. Which is precisely why both of my little troublemaking monsters will be given free reign of the Internet right until the time they **** it up and break my rules, as I monitor them without them knowing about it. The NSA has nothing on this father. Fortunately, I have a few years yet before I have to start worrying about it :P
None of this should be taken as agreement with the position Lorric is presently arguing, however. The policy should be shot down and shot down hard. School boards have much better things to be spending their budgets on.
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And once again you ignore the fact that we're dealing with children as young as 11 and not adults. Since when has any problem caused by children gone away completely by simply by having adults tell them what to do? Expecting 11 year olds to act responsibly is a basic denial of what an 11 year old is. Sure the parent has to exercise some responsibility since their children can't, but expecting this problem to go away simply by telling children what they should and shouldn't do online is such a naive view of how parenting works that I'm amazed you can express it.
And that's if I even agree with you that you can't abuse even fairly innocuous sounding comments. Not to mention that you're also forgetting that you're also going to have to edit anything said before people knew their children would have their posts data mined. In the case of the older kids that's several years worth of posts that need to be edited or removed.
This isn't an issue that needs to be (or even can be) solved by the parents, except by getting themselves a less idiotic school board.
I was going to leave this be after the Lorric mess started, but after thinking about it for a while here I think it is worth responding to. Not because I think what you've said is necessarily wrong, but because it seems to reflect a significant difference of opinion.
You seem to be operating on the premise that these are young kids and therefore require careful handling because they know not what they do online. However, each and every single one of these social media sites have age of consent requirements, most of which are set at 13 (13 also happens to be 1 year after most democratic countries make kids criminally responsible for their actions). With parental consent.
I realize you are arguing pragmatically here - kids, like it or not, do not do what their parents tell them to and will create social media accounts, and really shouldn't be monitored by their school and experience social consequences for it. I, on the other hand, am arguing threefold: (1) young kids aren't actually legally allowed to have social media accounts without parental consent, (2) anyone who posts online should be fully prepared to experience social consequences of it, and (3) the social consequences really shouldn't be all that dire due to the nature of the information.
From a practical standpoint, if parents are not going to properly monitor their children online or offline, their children are going to readily feel the consequences of any unmonitored behaviour that crosses boundaries, be they social or criminal. Some people appear to think that consequences are right and just when these kids do stupid things offline, yet online behaviour should get a pass. I disagree. As I keep saying, anyone can collect this information this school board will be collecting it. Their peers will actually be a lot BETTER at collecting and using this information against a poster than will adults. The child is likely to experience more negative consequences from their posting behaviour at the hands of their peers than any school monitoring system. All of which goes back to the point that if parents leave their kids to their own devices, their kids are going to experience consequences of that. This isn't a bad thing - we accept it readily enough in the offline realm, yet somehow parents get absolved of responsibility when their children go online. Like it or not, until their child reaches age of majority, parents are responsible for the behaviour of their offspring - especially, I argue, their social media behaviour. And being a parent, that means I do everything in my means to make sure my little monsters don't get themselves in ****, whether or not I like having that responsibility. The "they're just kids" argument doesn't fly - kids have parents, parents are expected to obey the law (age of consent for social media) and be responsible for the actions of their kids. And if they don't, then their kids are going to experience the consequences of that, and ultimately the parents.
So, if a child feels the consequences of some inappropriate public posts, unless those consequences are themselves criminal or civil violations, they are precisely the fault of the party that put the information out there - the kid, and by legal extension, their parents - and that is as it should be. Just because they're kids doesn't mean they get a pass on the nastiness of the world in general, however unfortunate that reality may be. Better this lesson is learned in a relatively mild context than with life-altering consequences as an adult.
I don't agree with the school board policy, but I also very much disagree that this is not an issue that should or can be solved by parents. Parents have legal and moral responsibility for the actions of their children, regardless of how either party feels about that unfortunate reality. Which is precisely why both of my little troublemaking monsters will be given free reign of the Internet right until the time they **** it up and break my rules, as I monitor them without them knowing about it. The NSA has nothing on this father. Fortunately, I have a few years yet before I have to start worrying about it :P
None of this should be taken as agreement with the position Lorric is presently arguing, however. The policy should be shot down and shot down hard. School boards have much better things to be spending their budgets on.
Well said, and a sensible position overall. The bottom line is that it's a ridiculous idea and there are better ways for schools to spend money.
The following has nothing to do with the quoted post:
I think what I'm going to take away from the article in the OP is...why is there ALREADY a contractor specializing in collecting social media information from minors and who has been hiring them?
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They aren't specializing in minors. That's just a normal data-mining company, and it's a very lucrative business. Collecting data from students is just another job for them, with different targets and probably much easier than from more privacy-aware adults. While I agree with the idea, trusting a company like that with it is rather questionable. If this was government controlled from start to end, then it'd be less worrying, even if a contractor would've been implementing and operating the tech (that was the initial impression I've had). Even NSA has more accountability than those guys, outsourcing data collection to a corporation that (like all corporations) only cares about money might not be such a good idea.