School spyware

Nineteen Eighty-Four isn’t a playbook.

Kansas Reflector report that Spyware turned this Kansas high school into a ‘red zone’ of dystopian surveillance:

Just imagine you’re a student at Lawrence High (go Chesty the Lion!) and every homework assignment, email, photo, and chat on your school-supplied device is being monitored by artificial intelligence for indicators of drug and alcohol use, anti-social behavior, and suicidal inclinations.

[…] If a word or an image triggers an alert in the AI software, the result could range from the student being sent to an administrator to being referred to online counseling to getting a visit from local police.

So many things wrong in so little. A trend in education to surveillance. The worse is that it is automated, and using black boxes (“AI software”). And then they want to involve police for suspected mental health. We know where that lead to in America, rarely any good outcome. The Minority Report isn’t a playbook either.

While this is happening in Kansas, there is nothing preventing this from happening elsewhere. And it likely does, staying under reported.