I don't understand why the parents are letting the school into their kids heads while they're at home to begin with. School administrators shouldn't be parenting (and we should ask ourselves why this seems reasonable for them to explicitly assume parenting roles over all the kids), and they should probably be more concerned about what kinds of porn their teachers are watching. They should never, ever be concerned with the question of which kids are watching which porn unless it somehow literally cannot be avoided because the kid drags it explicitly into the classroom.
If so, this is no different than your employer actively monitoring your activity on their devices.
When I was 12, I didn't sign an employment contract with my school and they didn't pay me. Have times changed so much? Why would you imply that two relationships are in any way comparable?
Owning a device does not grant you a right to violate people's privacy - if you lease a car, is it okay for the rental company to install cameras in it and record you having sex in it?
Whether or not you are being paid is irrelevant - the key part is that some other entity is providing hardware that they own and allowing you to use it under certain conditions. Those conditions are: use it for the purposes agreed upon, and the device will be monitored to ensure it is being used for only the purposes agreed upon.
I certainly don't think we're doing our kids any favors with the constant and forced surveillance 24/7. But I can understand why an organization wants to keep their hardware managed.
The only difference here is that kids are powerless, unlike customers renting sportscars for $$.
For one, I already said I agree that children's privacy shouldn't be invaded - that's not the point. The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Secondly, you first talked about a lease and now you seem to be talking about cars in general? But also companies which issue $150,000 sports cars? (Which company provides $150,000 sports cars, by the way? So I can apply.)
For what it's worth, every corporate fleet vehicle I've had the pleasure of using has been strictly monitored by the company who owns it - just like they monitor the other hardware that they own and lend me.
And if you're not talking about corporate owned vehicles - we're back to square one. Leases are different contracts with different expectations than loaned devices.
Why should that right win out in this case over the user's right to fiduciary technology that puts their interests first?
A company car can be worn out by driving it around for frivolous reasons, so the company will impose a condition that you can't do that, and monitor you to make sure you obey the restriction you agreed to.
A school issued laptop is not going to wear out any faster or slower depending on what you type on it. And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
The school might have a legitimate interest in whether the students are leaving their laptops plugged in all night mining Bitcoins and wearing out the battery. They don't have any legitimate interest in the contents of the students' diaries, whether they're written using school-issued tools or not.
Teaching students to expect this sort of treatment from people with power over them is corrosive to society.
Are you sure about that? I'm not allowed to use my employer's laptop for personal use. Why am I allowed to use the school's laptop for personal use?
> That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy
You like to talk about rights. Doesn't the school have the right to say, "You can't use this device unless you comply with the (arbitrary) rules that I make. One of those rules is that I'm going to spy on your use of this device. If you do not like it, you are free to use your own device instead."
The school has a right to impose conditions or monitor, to the same extent that anyone lending someone something has that right. But in this case it is in conflict with the child's rights, in a few ways:
1. The child may not know about the monitoring. 2. The child, being a child, may not actually have a feasible way to use their "own" device. The school-issued device may be the only device they have access to or that they or their family can afford. 3. The school may expect or require them to use the school-issued device in certain situations, and may not appreciate it when the child troops into class with their own personal machine, or tries to take a test from home on an ordinary PC. 4. The child has a right to a good education from the school, to make them into an adult that one is happy to share a society with. A good education should teach a person not to tolerate arbitrary restrictions, conditions, or monitoring without good cause, especially from a governmental agency.
Finally, I believe users of computing devices have the right to be able to rely on those devices as extensions of themselves. Having somebody else all up in your computing experience is a lot like having somebody else inside your head, and in general it shouldn't be allowed.
Except you know, all the non-hardware related issues computers can face such as viruses, ransomware, etc.
>And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
I'll need a source on that. My kids school laptop comes with strict "no personal use" instructions.
Look at the "what Gaggle flagged on kids' computers" chart: none of this is "video games" or "wasting time on YouTube" or "visiting sketchy domains that might host ransomware". If that sort of stuff was in "Other", "Other" would be the biggest category. If personal use of the devices or accounts outside the particular areas Gaggle scans for is against policy, the school doesn't seem to be using this tool to try and enforce that policy.
They are instead using the tool to examine everything the students do or store that might be related to these topics, whether it happens during personal or academic use.
Or we should aggressively throw that idea out and take privacy rights to take precedence over corporate ownership of property. If the organization isn't willing to trust you with that device without constantly monitoring you, they shouldn't "lend" it to you (since "lending" in this context is always coercive and its mandated by your employer as well and you cannot effectively opt-out).
I thoroughly reject that right as being valid. It should never have been invented as a concept, and you should not be defending that supposed "right".
If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them, and I expect the article to be returned to me in good condition.
And you keep arguing that "surely you understand that they must have right" which is exactly what I'm rejecting, and its very frustrating that you can't even seem to comprehend that someone would strenuously object to your premise to begin with. You just keep on restating that I MUST agree with you that they have that right as a premise to the argument. I reject the premise. If we can't get past that there's no point to this any more, we can't even have an argument about the beneficial effects of rejecting that premise and the horrible effects that keep getting worse and worse of being brainwashed into accepting those "rights" like they're physical laws and not something that we can choose to change.
And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed to accept things that never should have been accepted.
Because I am able to separate what is reality and what my ideal is. My ideal aligns closely with yours. But I try not to let it cloud what the reality is; mainly that organizations which provide assets for free to employees/students are allowed to stipulate conditions of use, one of which may be monitoring.
>If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them
You are absolutely allowed to give a laptop to a friend and say "By the way, this has a keylogger on it. If you want to use it, just know that keystrokes are being recorded". You, as the owner of that device, have every right to do that. The key being that you notified the other party (like, for example, terms and conditions of use). Trust doesn't even come into the equation. Would that make you a shitty friend? Yes. Can you still do it? Yes.
>And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed
Jesus that escalated quickly. I am saying that organizations are allowed to have terms of use on their equipment, one of those terms being that the device is monitored, and suddenly I'm the cause of the surveillance state.
1. They are not 'free', they are paid for with taxes
2. stop equating employees and children, it's daft, any judge would throw out such argument without a second thought
3. there are currently like 30 active lawsuits against schools and states for spying. The case law is not set on this matter, it's a new phenomenon and now is the chacne to set the recond strain.
4. Just because you put 'your house now belongs to me' or 'you are now my slave' into terms and condition doesn't make it legally valid.
Indeed it did and it reminds me of a lot of conversations I’ve seen on Twitter with unreasonable people who hold the entire world to their personal ideals, everything else be damned.
Just don’t engage.
That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy. You can demand compensation for damage, but you can't control their life.
If it did exist, it would lead to dystopia. A microcontroller with Wi-fi cost like $0.5, in the next 10 years they will be in library books, pens, shoes, do you want to live in a future where literally everyone can spy on you and fine you every time you let wind because it's against term 527 in T&C?
Who says you have a right to privacy on a device you do not own, provided to you by another organization for a specific use case (school-related learning) and which comes with terms and conditions of use (which, more than likely, includes a monitoring clause)?
Hate to break it to you, but schools and organizations have rights too. One of those being "if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property.".
The law does. You paid for the device, or a car or a house you are renting. For the duration on your possesion the owner does not get to randomly violate your rights. If they are not happy with it, they should not have given you the device.
"if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property."
While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house, and a waiver in case it ends up being child porn .
Also give them a waiver in case they record a conversation with your lawyer, doctor or employer, breaking attorney-client privilidge, medical privilidge or sensitive conversation with your employer.
You aren't renting a car. You are being provided a laptop, owned by someone else, and allowed to use it subject to the fact that you follow their terms and conditions, which happens to include monitoring. Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving.
>While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house,
If you wanna make sex tapes on company or school provided laptops... By all means, go for it. But I have no idea what it has to do with this conversation
You are being provided a vehicle, owned by someone else. There is no difference, neither is an act of charity
You dont have to use a car, but your kid has to be at school, and has to use their laptop, so you don't have a choice to reject the 'terms and conditions'.
Is you kid's privacy worth less than $300 laptop?
"Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving."
American Civil Liberties Union director Vic Walczak said that “the school district's clandestine electronic eavesdropping violates constitutional privacy rights, intrudes on parents' right to raise their children and may even be criminal under state and federal wiretapping laws.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_Scho...
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/is-your-school-spyin...
The amount of folks here willing to jump to defend the 'rights' of organisations at the expence of personal liberty is disturbing
Nonsense. If I rent an apartment, the landlord very clearly has no rights to fill it with cameras to monitor use.
Sure, there's a contract that if I damage the premises they can bill me after the fact. But that's it.
Not at all, no. Ownership of the device (worth very little, maybe I'd feel different if it was a $100+K instrument on loan) should morally grant no spying rights whatsoever to the owner.
Privacy of the person, but particularly a child, far outweighs the importance of any cheap gadget.
The fact that you're sitting there wondering how I could possibly object to something so normal and obviously correct is precisely the entire fucking problem.
None of these invasions of privacy should be allowed or considered normal.
Homework, no?
But once my oldest (9) started disappearing with his iPad for too often and too long, I did browse his YouTube history (I had to ask him to unlock his iPad, as I don't have or know the passcode). And after that I blocked YouTube, as there was just too much adult content for a nine year old. I have also made it a rule that computing and screen time needs to happen in family areas
I still feel like I violated his trust. But I also feel like I can't responsibly allow him to have access to YouTube or the full Internet without experiencing negative effects to his emotional development. I am unsure if I am a helicopter parent in this situation, and if I went too far
Did the same for my 6 year old. Yes, there is a lot of stuff I dont want my kid watching.
He used to watch video game videos, mainly by other kids, so I didnt mind.
Then one day, I heard him swearing. Looks like some (a lot?) of these kids swear, even in games like minecraft. And they use sexist language; again, these are videos by kids, some just a few years older than my son.
And now Youtube is banned.
I dont understand where this "helicopter" parent thing comes from. Like another commenter says, will you let you kids eat anything they want? Watch TV till 11 in the night?
Or steal your parent's credit card. Its an American company after all they use their CC for everything and a CC is completely normal for identification for some ungodly reason that I do not comprehend.
My reasoning is that these platforms (as we've recently seen) know full well that they cause harm. That gets verified pretty regularly by independent researchers. Standing by and letting a preteen deal with that on their own has predictable enough results: my job is to Sherpa kiddo through life and part of that involves deploying myself as a kind of surrogate sense of self regulation when his fails. I'm pretty liberal and allow privacy on most things (I would never read a diary etc) but draw a line between what he consumes and produces. Privacy is for production, at the moment. Private consumption can come later.
tl;dr you did right, imo.
Yes and also to protect him from the adults who author addictive, compelling content that a 9-year old can’t be mature enough to protect against.
If you don’t regulate his internet activity, why do you regulate his diet? Why not allow him to eat whatever he wants whenever he wants?
Now, it is clear that the diffusion of digital technology invariably takes us to different pastures. We are not in Kansas anymore when everybody carries a connected supercomputer. Both parenting and education will be impacted and will never be the same again. A new equilibrium must be found. But what is happening in the past decade or so is just an unwarranted wild west that capitalizes (literally) on ignorance, inertia, confusion, regulatory capture and political dysfunction.
Most services do not have the direct and easy to apply capability to physically harm you or your family.
How is this remotely true? The stranger, after you stop paying them for the service, might spread lies about you, treat your child badly, show your child things you wouldn’t want (guns, drugs, movies, etc). The faceless corporation directly profits off the information it gains, but you can be sure the access control and security measures taken by them mean it’ll never be used to oust something embarrassing about you to your community. Only a dozen or so engineers at Google have direct database access and all of that access is logged and audited.
How could you possible write this, did you live under a rock for the past 10 years?
Big Co's have literally extorted people and leaked their sex tapes, Vigilante placed bounties on people's heads, Equifax left national databases unsecured, phone operstors have sold realtime location to the highest bigger and left the website to access it unsecured, the list goes on an on. Unbelievable!
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shells-out-millions-of-d...
> that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good"
Are actually two separate problems with our society.
Problem 1: denying privacy to children, various forms of helicopter parenting. This you've covered, and I agree this is our era's way of mistreating children.
Problem 2: "by team of strangers". as a Service. This is a much broader topic to cover it all here, but constrained to the context of data processing and children - social-wide, we're too eager to entrust sensitive matters to random strangers, giving them too much leeway, as if they weren't incentivized to abuse it in every way they can get away with.
People are having ridiculously inconsistent "trust functions" here. You wouldn't give this level of access to a small shop from your neighborhood that offered you a service, but you give it to a random tech startup from far away, just because the guy looks kind of creepy and the startup has a shiny web page. Even though a realistic threat model would suggest the former can be trusted way more than the latter (less incentives and less capability to screw you over, and they live near you). It's like most people can't internalize the lesson, even though they're being repeatedly screwed over by almost every business they interact with.
What pisses me off more, is when it's the other party that inserts some third parties into the process. When you have a kid attending a school, there's a degree of trust and responsibility shared between you and the school. But then the school outsources data management or remote learning to some random vendors, vendors who absolutely cannot be trusted. And as a parent, you can't do much about it.
One day in the future people will look back at our times and think about all of us and most of the market the way we today think about literal snake oil salesmen and people duped by them.