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Tldr surveillance software on loaned school computers can be used by schools to find when students are using lgbtq keywords and potentially out them
That's why you never use a school or work computer for personal use.
at a recent job i handled backups and restores for the company and in the process of restoring requested files from laptops you see everything else they have saved too. seemed like pretty much everyone was using their work laptop as their one and only computer.
Porn. So much porn.
And, unfortunately, illegal stuff. Which we had to report.
Joke's on them... I put normal porn on my work laptop so they think I'm into normal shit, then I watch the REA, fucked up porn on my personal PC.
If it's your only computer, you may not have a choice, and we're talking about kids here, who are stuck with what their parents do or don't buy them. I can easily see a teen in a lower-income household being stuck between a rock and a hard place here.
Having a camera in their bedroom wasn't enough, gotta go full on thought police.
It's not just devices on loan from the schools.
Whether on school-issued devices or downloaded onto students’ own, these software tools do not disclose the source code of their software nor how they prioritize student information for review and reporting, leaving parents, students, and even school administrators ignorant of what the privacy concerns even are before they can begin working for mitigation. But what is known is not good. A.I. automation tools, such as those used by Gaggle, are rife with broken promises about accuracy. They often have fundamental racial and gender biases. A consequence of using these tools to monitor students’ online content is that they will disproportionately affect people of color and marginalized groups.
If you have your own computer, and don't want to use the school one, they would have you install the software on your own machine. It's not clear why parents or students would consent to that. It was probably something like, you need to use MS Word or Google docs for your homework so you need to install this software to do so.
The use of Gaggle has resulted in the constant monitoring of students through their Gmail and Microsoft Office accounts, even when at home using personal devices. Gaggle even monitors in real time the content being written by students on Google Docs.
The level of surveillance is breathtaking.
OK...i dony have kids, but even if you ignore the anti gay/trans aspect of it, this is fucking creepy, right? Like this seems like an unacceptable level of intrusion into a child's life. I find it staggering that this just kind of happened and it wasnt front and center news everywhere! Absolute clown shoes level of crazy.
Agree
It's not remote learning that enabled this, it's educational institution malware.
One thing that occurs to me, that is not mentioned in the article, is the data mining and retention. Companies like Gaggle are no doubt keeping all the data they are getting. It will be sold and used in the future. The data would be a treasure trove for advertisers and political organizations. I foresee a Cambridge Analytica for a new generation.
Also, it may sound like science fiction, but the idea of using machine learning with this and data collected in the future to generate algorithms to predict future behavior and attitudes based on childhood writings and online behavior is probably on these companies drawing boards.
Old news (2022) but still dystopian.
This is so, so fucking stupid.
Am i really supposed such a jarring and complete lack of ceitical thinking ability to believe that this is an issue worth writing an article about?
To explain: of all the monumentally incompetent, illegal, mond-numbingly stupid, and agressively short-sighted things a trenager is inevitably going to type into a school laptop I'm supposed to believe that THIS, this is what is worth writing an article about?
I do not disagree with what the author is teying to say but holy fucking shit what a load of pandering, steaming shit this is.
Getting flagged for being trans is, like, one of a countless number of idiotic things a teenager could do with a school laptop with monitoring software installed that could potentially land them in hot water.
The dangers of normalizing surveillance amongst students are so fucking multitudinous that to highlight any one of them is fuckjng pointless when addressing the root of it covers ALL of them. Including the subject of this article.
As soon as the kids are the school find this out I guarantee every single one of them will write queer or trans on the laptop, the system will get flooded and they will have to stop
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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