[liberationtech] Hey kids, welcome to the panopticon!

[Thomas Delrue]

There's so much wrong with this approach that I don't even know where to
start... Your title was incredibly appropriate!

On 12/24/19 19:46, Yosem Companys wrote:
> When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s
> Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth
> beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with
> an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

And what about those students that either don't carry a cell phone or
those that turn those anti-features off? Why are those punished even
though they participate equally well?

At some point, this is just a professor being a lazy person and not
actually wanting to do their job properly (like taking attendance - heck
why does attendance even matter if you pass the class, what are we, 5?)

> And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging
> their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and
> can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts
> students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never
> been so full.
> 
> “They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting
> on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”

This sounds very much like an abusive relationship: "I hold something
you like and I *will* make you act out things as silly as I can think them."
This sounds more like a power-trip rather than anything else.

> Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering
> colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of
> students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use
> such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze
> their conduct or assess their mental health.
> 
> But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems
> represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’
> privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will
> infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow
> into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal
> part of living, whether they like it or not.

I am happy to see people speaking up against this! I commend them for
daring to speak out and hope their voice gets amplified!

> “We’re adults. Do we really need to be tracked?” said Robby Pfeifer, a
> sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which
> recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the
> campus’ WiFi network. “Why is this necessary? How does this benefit
> us? … And is it just going to keep progressing until we’re
> micromanaged every second of the day?”
> 
> This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for
> many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to
> an online backbone, now can measure people’s activity and whereabouts
> with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into
> trend lines that companies promise to help optimize.
> 
> Americans say in surveys they accept the technology’s encroachment
> because it often feels like something else: a trade-off of future
> worries for the immediacy of convenience, comfort and ease. If a
> tracking system can make students be better, one college adviser said,
> isn’t that a good thing?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions...

> But the perils of increasingly intimate supervision — and the subtle
> way it can mold how people act — have also led some to worry whether
> anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far.
> “Graduates will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking
> and social credit systems,” one commenter on the Slashdot message
> board said. “Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all
> 1984.”

It appears that some people read Orwell's 1984 and took it to be a
manual rather than the warning it was intended to be.

> Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth
> transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’
> movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi
> networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data
> points per student every day.

What could possibly go wrong...

> School and company officials call location monitoring a powerful
> booster for student success: If they know more about where students
> are going, they argue, they can intervene before problems arise. But
> some schools go even further, using systems that calculate
> personalized “risk scores” based on factors such as whether the
> student is going to the library enough.
> 
> The dream of some administrators is a university where every student
> is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that
> are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed.

It appears that they are in the wrong 'business' then.

> But some educators say this move toward heightened educational
> vigilance threatens to undermine students’ independence and prevents
> them from pursuing interests beyond the classroom because they feel
> they might be watched.
> 
> “These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a
> student population because it serves their interests, in terms of the
> scholarships that come out of their budget, the reputation of their
> programs, the statistics for the school,” said Kyle M. L. Jones, an
> Indiana University assistant professor who researches student privacy.
> 
> “What’s to say that the institution doesn’t change their eye of
> surveillance and start focusing on minority populations, or anyone
> else?” he added. Students “should have all the rights,
> responsibilities and privileges that an adult has. So why do we treat
> them so differently?”
> 
> [snip]
> 

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