[liberationtech] Hey kids, welcome to the panopticon!

[Thomas Delrue]

On 1/3/20 13:12, Richard Brooks wrote:
> This is not just for students. There are companies marketing academic
> "analytics" 
> (https://www.aaup.org/file/AcademicAnalytics_statement.pdf) which
> allow administrations invasive information collection on faculty
> activities for analyzing "productivity."
> 
> Have heard many descriptions of all the types of data that can be
> collected on the activities of departments and individual faculty
> members. Have never heard any mention of insights gained or ways of
> improving the quality of work.

A quote attributed frequently, rightly or wrongly, to Cardinal Richelieu
applies here: "Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus
honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre."

The point of this type of technology is to provide substantiation for
why you have been fired once you've found yourself in the cross-hairs of
your manager/HR department. It's just there to retroactively go "see,
you were 'slacking/not productive/doing whatever' so we have grounds and
it checks the box our lawyers told us to check".

I have yet to encounter a company or organization that would use this
info and then actually sit down with the subjected party and
constructively work on a real plan to 'improve quality of work', instead
of summarily firing them or putting them on a PIP (Personal Improvement
Plan), the latter of which all too often is nothing more than a "you'll
be out of here in X months"-kinda thing.

Remember that an HR department is not there for the benefit of the
employees of the company, it exists to protect the company FROM said
employees.

> Have seen some suggestions for the academic equivalent of search
> engine optimization. They suggest ways of tricking people to cite
> your papers more often and inflate your h-index. (Somehow I have
> difficulty imagining Einstein, Goedel, Wiener or Newton obsessing
> about their citation numbers in hopes of getting a raise.)

If it'll be measured, it'll be gamed. (On this subject, has SEO actually
graduated yet out of the School of Black Arts and into a real thing?)

I do have to admit that the comparison with Einstein or Goedel is a bit
off as they weren't in the publish-or-perish-rat-race anymore. They
reached a point in their career where they'd be hired to do whatever the
heck they wanted, regardless of publications.

The more fundamental problem is that number of citations has become the
thing on how you're measured, and so people will game it (and that's
part of our nature, mind you).

> It seems like management by using the eye of Sauron and instilling
> terror on your Untertanen (better in German 
> https://www.interglot.com/dictionary/de/en/translate/Untertanen) is
> starting to be considered to be the best way of improving the quest
> for knowledge.
> 
> And, if Rutgers (a public institution) is willing to shell out $500K
> on this snake oil to spy on tenured faculty, you can be certain that
> lots of public institutions will pay more to track the students who
> have a worse bargaining position. And, of course, university
> administrations are not the only people tracking the poor kids: 
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/dont-leave-campus-parents-are-now-using-tracking-apps-watch-their-kids-college/

I had not yet read this one, but WOW!

>From the article: "
“Because my parents don’t track me with the intention of micromanaging
me, but for safety, I don’t have an issue with it,” Cameron Baird told
The Post via text.
"

Safety from /what/ exactly? And how, how does this 'protect' you in any
way, shape, or form?
How afraid are these people? I wonder what it must be like in their head...

>  On 1/2/20 11:27 PM, Spencer Sevilla wrote:
>> Knowing undergraduate students' propensities for sleep, cheating,
>> and beer money... I eagerly await the role of "phone walker" as a
>> side job for an entrepreneurial nerd who was already planning to
>> head to class and the library anyways ;-)
>> 
>> But in all seriousness: this is horrendous, and in my eyes the
>> greatest damages revolve around the normalization of surveillance
>> and training students to get used to supervision. On the other
>> hand, I also care a lot less about the social impacts of private
>> universities, as opposed to public ones. It's hard for me to
>> envision this approach taking hold at a public institution, just
>> because we're always so chronically underfunded, but I do tend
>> towards the optimistic side of things.
>> 
>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 2:27 PM Thomas Delrue
>> <thomas at epistulae.net <mailto:thomas at epistulae.net>> wrote:
>> 
>> 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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> 
>