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A comment on Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance of Kids.

Re:Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance o... by psyc on Saturday March 17, 2018 @04:22PM (#16608877)
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

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Re:Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance o... by OscarCunningham on Saturday March 17, 2018 @05:09PM (#16609071)
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.

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Re:Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance o... by psyc on Saturday March 17, 2018 @07:53PM (#16609740)
It was a play on words.
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Re:Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance o... by gruez on Saturday March 17, 2018 @05:53PM (#16609261)
>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.

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Re:Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance o... by psyc on Saturday March 17, 2018 @07:52PM (#16609736)
Because it’s a misguided idea, more likely to result in false-positive hassles, chilling effects, and general paranoia, than to actually prevent crimes.
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