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Schools Are Helping Police Spy On Kids' Social Media Activity (orlandosentinel.com)
schwit1 shares this excerpt from an article in The Washington Post: Schools in Florida are renewing a program that monitors their students' social media activity for criminal or threatening behavior, although it has caused some controversy since its adoption last year. The school system in Orange County, where Orlando is located, recently told the Orlando Sentinel that the program, which partners the school system with local police departments, has been successful in protecting students' safety, saying that it led to 12 police investigations in the past year. The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends, the monitoring software used to check students' activity. It's the same software used by police in Racine, Wisconsin, to track criminal activity and joins a slew of similar social media monitoring software used by law enforcement to keep an eye on the community.
SnapTrends collects data from public posts on students' social media accounts by scanning for keywords that signify cases of cyberbullying, suicide threats, or criminal activity. School security staff then comb through flagged posts and alert police when they see fit.
SnapTrends collects data from public posts on students' social media accounts by scanning for keywords that signify cases of cyberbullying, suicide threats, or criminal activity. School security staff then comb through flagged posts and alert police when they see fit.
What could possibly go wrong when amateur sleuths with spare time decided to look for incriminating evidence in everyday speech and activities?
I'm sure they'll find lots of things to report to the police which the police will take seriously and investigate - completely screwing up children's lives by criminalising them.
I just hope the children don't slip up on Facebook privacy settings so the school can't see what they're posting.
This is, of course, teaching the children to be fearful and to hide from arbitrary, vengeful authority. Bad for their mental health - but realistic training for life in the USA today.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Schools have been doing this for years.
Around 2012 a bunch of kids at the local highschool got on the local news (A few of them I knew) because they all got suspended for liking a picture on facebook about 3 months earlier (They were "Disrupting the learning enviroment" apparently).
The picture was a photoshop of one of the administrators, with devil horns and the caption "Cunaosaurus Rex".
The rage inducing part was that they had the tech admin constantly refreshing facebook for a few days, trying to track down anyone who commented or liked the picture, putting usernames into pipl.com if they didn't use their real name on their account.
Your tax dollars at work. Meanwhile, I have seen their algebra/geometry/calc textbooks. Lots of them missing covers and pages and generally pieces of shit.
Buy new ones? nah, gotta pay some dude to browse facebook looking for kids who made fun of one of the school administrators.
Do you remember the case of the school calling the cops claiming a terrorist threat for a kid with an open suitcase and a digital clock?
But I'm sure schools in a classy state like Florida would never make a mistake like that.
Sounds like school children will learn a lot about security in their Internet use and perhaps the details of encryption. Not too soon to become educated.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
Is this any different to kids saying stuff out loud in the real world, being overheard, and someone reporting it to the authorities?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
Kids threatening other kids out loud is one thing. Scouring through their internet posts to find something with which you can incriminate them is another thing entirely. It's like the difference between a cop seeing you doing something illegal outside, and the police being able to track you with security footage to see if there is anything they can charge you with.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
A Big "BullShit"!
The school has a responsibility to protect students while they are on school grounds, inside school buildings and at school events.
If they "ride the bus", the school has a responsibility to provide safe and appropriate transportation.
. Period!
The school has no responsibility past the schoolyard boundary.
If you think otherwise, then you have given up the right to have and rear your own children.
This is Hill C.'s "It takes a [Federal] village" to raise a child.
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
The problem is that SnapTrends passes on the posts to school security, and school security passes on the posts to the police.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer, and they may not even have a right to remain silent.
Police are skilled at manipulating adults, to say nothing of children, into false confessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and the school police have been prosecuting normal childhood behavior as crimes.
As Slashdot readers could guess, they prosecute minority children disproportionately http://njdc.info/wp-content/up...
And Americans are tought from a young age to keep their mouth shut when they might want to voice opinions that their masters don't like. At least Putin has more sense of humor than the kind of teachers implementing things like that.
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
The bad argument: "Abloobloo technology back in my day rabble rabble luddite fucksticks."
The good argument: Schools shouldn't be wasting time or money on this bullshit. Property taxes, funneled to schools, should be going to education, not doing cops fucking jobs for them.
Ignoring whether or not your assertion is correct, unfortunately the end result is prosecuting students (perhaps over actions normally deeemed 1st amendment protected), not protecting them.
Our public school district here simply sends the kids home with iPads with pre-installed spyware. I've even seen the camera light turn on out of the blue.
BS. iPads don't have camera lights. Stop making things up.
The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends
I guess this is really a great thing since the school district has all that excess money that they can't find a use for.
This is for a school system (orange county) with a budget of over 1.5 billion. And if 1.5 billion sounds excessive for a school system budget, consider that this school system has 190,000 students, so that works out to less than $7900 per student (average for the US is about $12000). That paints a picture of a pretty bare-bones school system, but amortized over the entire student body that $18,000 works out to less than a dime per student, so nobody is losing access to AP courses (or football) over that particular purchase.
Supposing that monitoring student social media use for cyberbullying is a good idea, it seems to me that $18,000 is a bargain compared to paying humans to sift through the postings from all the students in the 18 high schools and 32 middle schools in the district. There may be reasons to object to this, but expense isn't one of them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bullshit. If kids learn critical thinking and have all the facts they turn out conservative. When they don't have the facts, they turn more liberal and later when they get older and wiser become more conservative. Why would the right wing be opposed to that?
The problem with bad teachers is that the kids aren't learning much of anything. It really is no more complicated than that.
Except for the fact that the well educated parts of the US consistently turn out more liberal people, well educated countries turn out more liberal people, and liberalism in general is much more flexible with new information that conservatism.
I'm not here to debate the two, but liberalism vs conservatism usually comes down to a matter of mental flexibility. Places which are conservative (the plain states, the south) are usually poorer states with fewer people, many of whom live in isolation. They become much less comfortable dealing with new information or ideas, and old people in general have problems with that as they advance in age.
You can debate which one is better, but saying that conservatism comes with knowing all the facts or with quality education is almost completely wrong, as the complete opposite is usually true.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
All of this conversation is pointless if you cannot define liberal or conservative. In US culture they aren't really ideals so much as they are pre-packaged bundles of positions that conveniently align with one of the major parties. That's why you find a strong correlation between people's position on, say, gun control and gay marriage even though there is absolutely nothing to relate these issues. American political culture forces people to pick a side and stick with it.
Differently than teachers, the salaries of school and school district administrators have risen tremendously. And from the administration, you get all the talk about how teachers' unions would cause higher education costs. If you load your schools with more and more administrative tasks, be it constant evaluations of pupils, of teachers or both, or be it a thorough documentation of about anything and constant reports to be filed, you raise costs. And you get yourself an expensive adminstrative monster and rising education costs.
If you had the same type of school than in the 1960ies, where blackboard, chalk and quad paper are the only teaching tools, without any laboratories, libraries, beamers or any type of technical infrastructure, at the housing prices of 1960 and without all that administrative overhead of today, you suddenly would notice a significant drop in education cost.
I attended first grade in 1958. All the schools I attended had well stocked libraries, musical facilities, art materials, gymnasiums and sports equipment. High school had labs. We had shop classes with tools. We had videotapes in 1963.
Just because there were no computers doesn't mean there was no technology.
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