📑 Schools Are Pushing the Boundaries of Surveillance Technologies

Bookmarked Schools Are Pushing the Boundaries of Surveillance Technologies (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Surveillance does not equal safety; it undermines student trust in their learning environments, isn’t effective at keeping them safe, and reinforces systemic injustice. Schools need to slam the brakes and think about what kind of dystopia they’re creating for their students.

Mona Wang and Geenie Gebhart discuss the increase of surveillance technology in schools. This is often used in the name of safety, however the authors suggest education is being “made a testbed for mass surveillance with no evidence, and no way to opt out.”

Ever since I have been in education, there have been applications to support surveillance. I think what has changed is their breadth and reach. Where the applications providing ability to view screens was restricted to the computer lab, the rise of portable devices and cloud computing has made such surveillance more doable.

Although focusing on data, Ben Williamson provides his own take on the current climate within education:

Few people ever been that bothered by data in education.

But it's centre of battles over facial recognition. Huge datasets on millions of young people. Big tech all over schools. Emotion AI, brain tech & bioinformatics all being tried out.

Education is the experimental lab.

— Ben Williamson (@BenPatrickWill) February 29, 2020