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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.
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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. The new rule is when my little girl isn't doing homework, the hard cover is put on it and it gets stuffed in the bookbag. And she's not to do any web browsing on it that isn't school related.
For her personal stuff she has a desktop PC and an Asus Transformer. This is actually an interesting life lesson. It's good to treat work-issued devices as spy hardware and not put personal things on them when she grows up as well.
I'd just tell the school where to shove their iPad but if she doesn't use it they issue twice as much written homework and make it harder for her to participate in class. What I'd like to know is why the school system thinks they have a right to spy on my child after school hours.
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
If the camera light has come on then it is time to accuse the district of kiddie porn. With the current environment, the burden of proof will be on them and with, at least, one district having already been nailed on this issue, it will likely lead to policy changes. The camera on the device, in this context, is supposed to be used only to locate the device if it is reported stolen. If they are capturing pictures of someone under the age of 18 using the device, then there can only be one purpose, at least as far as the public is concerned.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
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.
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.
I would also add that kids have to learn that anything that is done on a school network or computer is not private.
If they were monitoring the school networks and computers, that would be one thing, but this goes far beyond that. That software is designed to monitor the public social media feeds of the students outside of school. This by itself is not what I object to. After all, some school officials and some parents are probably doing some of that monitoring already, and since these are public posts, it's not like students can complain.
What I am concerned with however is that school staff are rarely a neutral party when it comes the speech of their students. Because let's not fool ourselves, the primary reason school officials are searching through social media posts is to look for their own names first, the second thing they look for are videos of themselves (just in case a student recorded them losing it in front of students), and the third thing they look for is anything that might paint their school in a potential negative light. And of course, I am sure that cyberbullying, suicide signs, and other warning signs, are things that they'll look for as well, but in my opinion that's a distant 4th, 5th, and 6th priority for them.
And so if the school is going to spend 18k a year on this stuff, I don't think they should be the ones doing it. They're not capable of being impartial observers. And if a dean really wants to monitor his own/her own reputation online, he/she should be doing it on her own dime and outside of working hours. And as to the safety issue, I do believe that parents, other kids, the general public, tattle tales, and law enforcement authorities, are still going to be the best and quickest sources of information when something bad publicly crops up on the internet.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Not legally.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer
Yes they do. They also have a right to demand that their parents be present during questioning.
The problem here is not the rights, but knowledge of those rights. If you have teenage kids, you need to teach them their legal rights. Have them watch the Do Not Talk to the Police video. If you kid is questioned by the police, they should be trained to say exactly four words:
1. I
2. Want
3. My
4. Parents
Once they say those four words, the police are legally obligated to stop questioning them until their parents are present.
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.
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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