Today I learned about Social Sentinel[0], since both right-twitter and left-twitter are condemning it today. Kind of heartwarming to see everyone (except LE and opportunistic entrepreneurs) agree on something for a change. Anyway, seems the idea is to analyze kids' social media accounts and send minority reports to the police. All too easy to spin it like "nothing to see here" too. Interesting that this company has been around for 4 years and I can't find a single testimonial about any attacks it prevented.

[0] https://www.socialsentinel.com

Eventually one of the parties will oppose it more strongly than the other one, at which point the other one will be forced to support it. I believe this is known as "spontaneous symmetry breaking".

Also for what it's worth "minority report" was the term in the film for when one of the precogs disagreed with the other two, so it's not really applicable here. You'd be forgiven for forgetting this fact though, because the plot doesn't actually feature one.

It was a play on words.

>Today I learned about Social Sentinel[0], since both right-twitter and left-twitter are condemning it today.

Why? Just skimming the page, it seems to be monitoring public social media posts for threats. Am I missing something? It's not like they're forcing students to grant access to their social media accounts so they can be monitored.

Because it’s a misguided idea, more likely to result in false-positive hassles, chilling effects, and general paranoia, than to actually prevent crimes.

At my high school - a private prep school - we are required to have iPads. All of us were required to install a monitoring program that has access to most of what we do on the iPads (internet searches, messages, etc.). To my knowledge, it hasn't been used to incriminate anyone but it still makes me wary.

It doesn't need to incriminate anyone. It's sufficient to just intimidate everyone into conforming to whatever expectations are laid out. It's actually more corrosive to just prevent any "undesirable" behavior than to catch people who are "guilty."

(One of) the key effects here is the chilling effect.

Yes, you train people to be scared to Google it and then progressively train them to be scared to think about the question for fear that it will somehow leave tracks on the internet that can be found.

There will be an entire generation of kids for whom spying on everything they do on their computer till age18 will have been normalized.

What happens when they start participating in denocracy. It's hard to imagine they'll have the same expectations of personal privacy after that.

This is just their school issued Ipad. They'd hopefully have a personal computing device of some sort that they'd be free to do what they want on. Assuming they don't have helicopter parents who have to control every aspect of their kids lives, then they're just screwed.

Right -- it's the school's iPad, and they can set the terms of use.

Do schools still have libraries? They did when I went, and you can be sure they curated the set of books in the catalog and kept records of who checked out which ones.

Even the public libraries started disclosing checkout history to agencies with the advent of the PATRIOT act.

On the positive side, maybe there will be an entire generation of kids who learn in school the importance of using your own devices instead of devices issued to you and owned by others when you do things that you wish to keep private.

Better to learn that lesson in school, when the mistakes that teach it to you will be confined to your juvenile records, than to learn it as an adult when it can follow you for the rest of your life.

You mean like Social Media has already done to two generations? LOL

If anything, more people reshare criticism more publicly than ever, even as they are being surveilled.

Admittedly, the difference is that our society thinks it's OK to punish kids and teenagers to make them get in line. That's the actual problem and the solution is not to have them hide their thoughts as much as to respect them more as human beings.

Well, punishment rarely works as a method of education/parenting, and even if it does it's practically assured to not be the most effective method. Of course, some people remain who think even corporal punishment is OK for kids, but then again those are the kind of person you wish don't have kids anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I grew up with the knowledge that everything I did was monitored, given the nature of my parents employment.

All it led to was a lifetime of learning how to improve my opsec and now I work in the field myself.

Continuous improvement!

Just to clear up some confusion, you are likely referring to MDM software like MobileIron, Intune, or AirWatch. MDM software CANNOT see personal messages, photos, or access your own personal apps. Schools (and companies) use MDM software to inventory devices, push profiles to simplify things like VPN access, SSO, and email configuration. It is also used to to push school related applications to the device and sometimes for remote diagnostics and support. IT departments and school districts are as uninterested in your personal information as you are in them having it. No need to worry.

I'm kind of glad this sort of thing didn't exist when I was in high school. I'd have "borrowed" a teacher's ipad and started searching for child porn on their browser.

When I was in high school, my history teacher complained that he wrote down "caracas" (the city) as his password on some form for the IT people, but they entered his password as "carcass", assuming that he'd spelled the word wrong. Which, of course, meant that he'd told an entire class his password.

More than that, he let the entire class know they could find everyone's password by digging through the IT people's recycling.

Any parent that thinks schools won't end up abusing their newfound surveillance powers is deluding themselves. Look at the example of WebcamGate at Lower Merion High School in 2010.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Merion_High_School

Mass surveillance is an abuse. One could go further in exploring additional abuses by looking into what is done with the data (Where is the data stored? Who else has access? What do they do with the data? Is any of this knowable?) but indiscriminately collecting information on people in the hope it will somehow prove useful is nothing but a cover for seeding people with the notion that it's right and proper to have no privacy.

Consider this excerpt from the article: "“Schools are justified in thinking about safety, both in terms of gun violence and other possible hazards,” Rachel Levinson, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Gizmodo. “At the same time, these technologies do not exist in a vacuum; we know, for instance, that facial recognition is less accurate for women and people of color, and also that school discipline is imposed more harshly on children of color.”"

Everything Levinson says here is vague and remarkably inarticulate. Being concerned is insufficient and a better written article would have asked Levinson further questions to clarify these claims. Precisely how is a bunch of data like this going to curb gun violence? What other hazards are you referring to, exactly? Why should we be concerned about the details of accuracy of the collected information while we're questioning whether it was ethical and useful to collect this data in the first place? Which school situations where "discipline is imposed more harshly on children of color" will be resolved by watching surveillance footage or examining location data?

All the more reason why people should get their own computers, never use school-issued computers, and make sure that their own computers run only a free software OS, and install nothing but free software on top of that. Also everyone (not just parents and students) need to politically organize to let students use privacy respecting books and (only if strictly needed) computer education that can be used from any computer OS.

Here's a more specific article:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_Scho...

I don't think I would allow my daughter to have a laptop where the spyware comes pre-installed.

Assuming the school district doesn't abuse it (like webcamgate) what's to stop every hacker from here to Moscow in this day and age?

The school has a duty of care to ensure kids are not doing bad things via the internet. And yes - without filtering software its as bad as you think it could be.

Do parents have rights when it comes to this? What if the only way to compete school work is with a school issued laptop?

Change schools, or if public school get involved with the school board and make a stink.

Private schools can set their own rules.

With a public school you could just start shouting about the 4th amendment.

Home-schooling, and/or private schooling

Its issued for the purpose of doing schoolwork. What do you care if some Russian hackers gets their hands on your child's science fair project?

That said, do put electrical tape over the webcam and microphone.

> That said, do put electrical tape over the webcam and microphone

For the camera, I can see it (pun intended) as electrical tape is usually opaque to visible light. But the microphone? All electrical tape should do over the microphone is lower the input level slightly.

Land of the Free ⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾⁽³⁾

⁽¹⁾ No jaywalking ⁽²⁾ Permit 38A required to hold children outside areas designated safe per § 477e of title XVI ⁽³⁾ Civil rights temporarily suspended

Do the parents know about this? I can't imaging this happening in my country without massive, nation-wide action to stop it and fire/punish those that tried to implement the system.

I'm curious, which country? I'm in Norway and I think would cause an outcry here too.

Obligatory Black Mirror reference: S4E2 "Arkangel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yef_HfQoBd8