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Teachers 'Unwittingly' Spying On School Children With Surveillance Software (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A thousand schools across the UK are monitoring children's classroom activities through surveillance software, according to a new report released by privacy advocate group Big Brother Watch. The paper claims that schools have spent an estimated 2.5 million pound ($3.1 million USD) on monitoring solutions to keep an eye on pupils. The technology, known as 'Classroom Management Software', tracks computer usage, including pupil internet activity, browser history, and even keyboard strokes. The report found that 70% of secondary schools (PDF) in Britain have installed monitoring systems, across more than 800,000 school-owned devices and near to 1,500 privately-owned devices.
A few years ago there was a scandal about school-provided laptops that the kids took home. The school got caught red-handed using the cameras to spy on the kids even when they weren't using the laptops, in their own bedrooms.
The school insisted that they never did this, despite the fact that they got caught because they accused a student of using illegal drugs (in his own bedroom), based on video-camera evidence from one of these laptops.
Despite what the article says, I'm going to go with the "this is not unwittingly." Those teachers and organizations know or should know exactly what they're doing.Seems like some kids are able to. The court case for anyone who wants to read it. Keep in mind that the UK is the same country that tried to create life-long student records for "extremism." And there was also most recently the trojan horse scandal, and on top of that a school recently turned around and said that "If you don't go to the mosque, they'll be marked down as a racist for their entire school career." FYI: School is in the same region as the trojan horse scandal. The UK has a lot of problems.
Om, nomnomnom...
I also work in IT in a UK school.
You're exactly right. Our kids have an iPad each through the school but it is made abundantly clear to them and their parents (who own the iTunes account, what with their 13+ age restriction) that we, the school, owns the device. They can do what they want on it, though there are exceptions whilst they attend: We block facetime, iMessage and a couple of others during school hours (which is an absolute PITA - apple do not provide good enough controls for this stuff) and prevent the device from installing any apps rated 13+ via a profile, which cannot be removed by them, only us through the admin interface. All apps used in classrooms are vetted to ensure they're not 13+ before being used, and we avoid apps with ads in as much as possible. That said, we can't stop everything. There are plenty of proxy apps out there. Our web filter (installed on the tubes, not the devices) is used to block them as and when we spot them, because they use them to access porn sometimes, and facebook the rest of the time. Nothing wrong with facebook? This is a discussion about privacy, so we'd want to block facebook anyway, but they're there to work and learn, not browse their feed.
We do allow email, however. The encrypt all the things is causing some issues that have yet to be properly addressed on an official country-wide scale (afaik.)
We use classroom management software (this FOIR came to me, in fact) but it doesn't do any keylogging or any of that bullshit. I'm a privacy advocate, and respect students (and indeed the staff) privacy. The CMS software is used by the teacher to witness and close down that odd game embedded in the excel spreadsheet that Johnny has on a USB drive (we allow those, too) that he is playing instead of working on web design stuff, and to take over the kids screens to show them a presentation or video or whatever, or do group things like project one kids work to the TV in the room or get them to complete a survey or whatever.
We also have biometrics. Thumbprints for registration and the canteen (cashless school). I'm a bit iffy about this but it was installed before my time. Depending on politics and so on I'm going to look at removing the registration side... but mainly due to the cost and the ability for students to forget to register, messing with attendance data slightly. Though, I will say this about the biometrics: their fingerprints are not able to be used to identify the individual. You'll get away with around 4,000 people or so before the system starts seeing little Alice as our good friend Johnny from web design. The prints don't take enough points of data, and though, yes they can identify a student easily in a school, you can't use the data in a court of law as it's simply not good or reliable enough.