I take it that it's fine that I install a microphone with a transmitter in your ceiling fixture so long as I do 't damage the fixture itself.

> Don't immediately rush to assumptions of malicious intent

Is there a good reason to doubt that the intended purpose for installing the software was to use its advertised functionality?

Best to establish the facts first.

Following that logic, the act itself does not seem malicious. However, the logic of seeing students as suspects is.

It’s why one of the highest offenses is to leave school grounds during school. Ditto for prison.

In that light, of course students are suspects. They’re already guilty of not being adults. They’re not allowed to have jobs, or to decide what they want to learn, or any of the other things that make adults human.

I don’t know what to do about it, but recognizing it seems step one.

You're being downvoted, but I often felt exactly this way throughout my school years.

Is it? I don’t think I know any high school student that hasn’t tried to muck with, or work around, the schools systems.

So if you're renting an apartment from me, I am right to spy on your children with my ceiling bug?

> It would be more like if the cops had a valid warrant to track a suspects car, but installed the tracker in the wrong car by mistake.

The school is not a police force; nothing warrants their privacy intrusive surveillance of my children without my consent in the first place.

Too bad! They can be voted out, or face lawsuits if a heated attitude is too much for them that they feel the need to ignore valid feedback regardless of the emotions involved.

I've heard the same argument used for angry minority communities in the past, so this very much applies here as well. Heated rhetoric school boards are seeing today are reminiscent of a body that isn't listening.

Do I care more about making myself feel better by airing my grievances in whatever way suits my fancy, or do I care about a specific outcome?

If it's the latter, then the best thing to do is to figure out who is in charge, and, critically, the right way to talk to them in order to get the response -- and hopefully the outcome -- I want.

Sure, I could turn this into a crusade to vote out the school board and replace them with... who, exactly? The kind of people who are qualified and likely to get elected are probably pretty similar to the people there already: not too technically-inclined, and not willing to put up with an aggressive attack from parents. Even if I did manage to find and elect a school board that would take this kind of issue seriously without needing much prodding, by the time I went through this whole process, it'll be... a year? Two years? More? The ship will have sailed, and my hypothetical kid will have leaked all their private data to the school's nanny software already.

So hopefully I'd instead do the smart thing, approach the school board in a way that resonates with them, and get the outcome I want.

> I've heard the same argument used for angry minority communities in the past

I don't think this really applies here. Most "angry minority communities" are fighting for things that are systemically stacked against them, and often the "polite" approach doesn't work. But we're not talking about systemic oppression here; we're talking about an overworked, underpaid school IT department that doesn't have much choice in what they do, directed by a school board that doesn't understand the issues involved.

Only the world doesn't magically grants wishes to Kens and Karens, just because they feel strongly about something and how right they are. The person taking that board to court or trying to vote them out could just as trivially lose.