This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is also why (I think) that younger people don't like going outside. Cameras are everywhere. There's no privacy. We've become a world of creeps. Not really for the most of us. But if I was 10 years old I'd think everyone as creeps.
Now corporations are forcibly creeping into the classrooms. Yuck!
The world is turning into one giant shitty customer service experience.
The whole trend of teens rejecting phones for dumbphones is making sense now. If you can't fight big mainstream technology, then fuck big mainstream technology!
What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.
Don't remember whose quote it was, maybe Hannah Arendt, that the real tragedy of tyranny is not when people self-censor what they say out loud, but when this leads them to filter out those thoughts from arising at all
That's the surveillance panopticon, they know they are being watched, but not when.
Holy shit, the amount of surveillance the teens are under is ungodly and people blame the chatbot? And there wasn't even a human kind enough to speak with the girl before calling the fucking cops? I see a lot of blame to place here, but it's not the chatbot who is to blame.
Everyone of them failed a 13 year old girl. All of them should be ashamed.
The cops for arresting an 8th-grader
This is America, that's what they do. They love overreacting to small problems.
I was arrested for self-defence in a highschool fight, the actual bully who attack me did not get in any sort of trouble. If I didn't have citizenship, there was a chance that incident could've led to my deportation, even tho I was a minor. (USCIS can see all your arrests, including those that did not led to a conviction, or even expunged or pardoned offences, and they could retroactively revoke your legal status if they find out you lied.) But luckily charges were dropped because of couse they don't have the evidence to prove it and I have a clean record so they didn't bother prosecuting.
There is probably an alternate timeline somewhere out there in the multiverse where I got deported and had to learn another language that I haven't spoken for over a decade. Depressing to think about.
(Well that is still technically a possibility, all they have to do is make up some bullshit about "being a spy" and put me in gitmo)
I'm in Canada and it's only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the "don't go to school on X day" message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.
Police investigated the home and found:
Point being we couldn't get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a "normal" school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.
Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance
This is the problem
There is something fundamentally fucked up in a country that arrests and puts in jail a 13 years old kid over a bad joke.
And strip-searched!
Without notifying parents
Oh I missed that bit. JFC she's 13. How can police be so clueless about their own job... rhetorical question, I know the answer.
But can't put the pedo convicted felon grifter behind bars...
We are living in the shittiest kind of cyberpunk dystopia. Can't wait for AI-induced cyber-psychosis once people implant Musk's chips into their brains and give MechaHitler full access to their subconscious.
I was already glad being out of school before widespread take-home laptops and required after-school logging in to check for homework and shit, but this AI-driven surveillance is on a whole other level. Sometimes I'm wondering if it's just me getting old and doing the old people thing thinking things were better "back in the day" but is this current state not objectively worse, being monitored so much and having no way to really disconnect from school?
Citizen, Friend Computer has detected Bad Thought ^(tm)^ in your area! Please do not be alarmed! Remain where you are, a team of selected Troubleshooters will begin deploying Martin-Marietta neuron adjusters as quickly as possible.
Do not worry about side-effects: Martin-Marietta's studies have shown most people respond positively to having their neurons rewired! Plus it feels good.
Its not a technology issue, its a capitalism issue.
Idealy, people should be able to afford their own devices and just log in via a browser, but capitalism fucks everyone and kids are too poor to have their own laptop and has to use the school-issued one which is obviously managed and surveilled because they can't have you watching porn on it.
Also, #SaveSnowDays, stop forcing an online meet if its snowing and they cant get to school, just let kids have a day off once in a while.
I'm no fan of capitalism, but nothing in it requires public schools to install surveillance software on laptops. This seems purely like an administration issue, which is often the source of problems in general, not just in schools, but also in other sectors like healthcare, where they put in stupid policies while sucking up funding for themselves and their pet issues instead of towards the core purpose of that sector.
Agreed on the snow days. In fact, I think we should reduce the number of school days (and work days, for that matter) in general.
I can't say for certain because I wasn't given one but I can't imagine me and my friends would have been willing to communicate with each other on devices provided by our school. Even in the early 00s it would have been filled with spyware.
I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.
With the help of artificial intelligence, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement.
Not sure what's worse here: how the police overreacted or that the software immediately contacts law enforcement, without letting teachers (n.b.: they are the experts here, not the police) go through the positives first.
But oh, that would mean having to pay somebody, at least some extra hours, in addition to the no doubt expensive software. JFC.
Not sure what’s worse here: how the police overreacted or that the software immediately contacts law enforcement, without letting teachers (n.b.: they are the professionals here, not the police) go through the positives first.
The idea behind the policy is to stop school shootings. If there were a legitimate threat of violence, you would likely want the police to be notified as soon as possible. The issue here is that the authorities are letting a piece of half-ass code (Read: AI) decide what is a legitimate threat and, worse still, acting on that determination without question.
They have literally sacrificed an essential freedom for some temporary, and probably illusory, security.
Man, if only there was a good way to stop school shooting
Alas, one can only dream
This is exactly what is going to happen with the fucking chat control of the EU actually enforces it, but for an entire continent. Fuck this shit. Privacy is a human right.
Lots of wannabe authoritarians out there in educationland.
All those decades that the schools just -couldn't afford- more (well-educated) teachers and smaller class sizes. Lots of low-end look-good.
And then along came tech, and lo-and-behold, IT was going to be the savior. Let's buy into that! We may not be able to teach them to read, write or think, but they can learn to kneel!
“I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,” said Patterson.
Seems like the Gaggle CEO has a good view. They're still an enabler in these situations. Be it poor guidance or training. With the impact they have, taking responsibility would be tracking and ceasing contracts that do not follow this soft response approach.
Thought control
I mean pretty stupid to write that in the schools chat app, use signal or shit just regular iMessage
Anything with a very low rate of true positives applied to a large population is going to have an insane false positive rate. EG a 1 in 7M issue applied to 70M students with a 1% false positive rate would produce 700k false positives. Worse people who are actually planning a school shooting may be more likely to avoid telegraphing their intentions. So you could damage 700k kids futures and traumatize them without even catching many or any of the killers.
More free child labor in jails.
Talking about online privacy has become the “safe sex talk” of the last decade or so. You have to keep reminding kids so that it sticks. Nothing you say online is private, it can all be copied/screengrabbed/recorded/photographed and shared by the recipient. What you say, any images you post, etc. On school or work devices they can essentially see most everything, nothing is private. Even if you make efforts to cover your tracks, a truly determined agency with enough resources likely will find out who you are if they want to.
Some good news here is that if they apply this to society as a whole the jails would be too full, keep saying the no-no words online!
Arrested and strip-searched for a first offense? That's fucking ridiculous. I hope the lawsuit succeeds. It's the only peaceful tool we have to curb over-zealous law enforcement.
Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.
Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her “Mexican,” even though she’s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
Shouldn't they have used AI to collect the messages and then have a human manually intervene?
