It’s a terrible thing that’s happened, but fuck gadgetreview for that shitty misleading clickbait headline.
Editor knew they wouldn’t get the same impact with “teacher posted in a group chat that they were going to shoot a student”, so “group” becomes “private” and the detail about the threat gets moved way down into the article body. This is a journal who clearly wants to tell you what to think.
A group chat between 4 people should be just as private of a chat than between two people. Private isn't a quantity, you can have a private chat with 100 people if you wanted. However clearly none of its actually private.
And in any other country that may have been correctly classed as a joke, but in the US it ain't a joke. What a dystopia
I'm glad this person's life was semi-ruined by using big tech.
I am tired of normies using horrible platforms and then acting Pikachu-level shocked when they have horrible privacy violations.
Tech illiteracy + Big tech exploiting tech illiteracy = profit and constant surveilance
and normies are too damn stupid to get it, and every once in a while one of them gets fucked, and then... suddenly... nothing changes yet again
and these normies with their acceptance of any TOS, even the shittiest of shit, and making opting out some sort of social misstep, like "What?! You really don't use WhatsApp?" with an ugly look, means I am glad these assholes occasionally suffer for their ignorance
What a fucking ghoul.
You're so unique and smart.
I've been slowly dragging my family kicking and screaming away from surveillance state shenanigans but it's hard.
This is so disturbingly common. Remember the dad that sent a picture to his son's pediatrician?
Very disturbing, it was the last straw to switch my chats (besides family) to Signal.
I had held onto Telegram for years because of their fun animated stickers, but yesterday discovered that Signal has those too, actually all sets from Telegram are available on unofficial Signal sticker sites, so now I'm all sorted 😅
For anyone that doesn't know this yet, Telegram isn't secure - your messages are decrypted in the middle, on their servers. It's a shame they've got such a fun app otherwise
Funny that I have it the other way around. My entire fam on Signal and few (only close) friends on here
my family still uses Facebook Messenger, it's only the tech savvier people I hung out with on Telegram that I managed to switch to Signal 😮💨
Time to tell everyone to uninstall their apps.. Oh, wait. We already did that.
It's pretty incredible how we leave digital footprints everywhere. Like the Device IDs that Windows uses on Win 11/10. They can find you pretty easily based on just that alone.
So the lesson to the rest of us is DO NOT USE SNAPCHAT especially for private messaging.
I use Signal, was pressed to do so by privacy-minded friends and have pressed other friends to adopt the client.
So long as you don't accidentally include Jeffrey Goldberg in your chat, you're okay.
The duality of AI....one stops nonexistent threats another one happily puts you into danger
Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:
Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I'd give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven't read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you're using isn't scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?
Since you haven't read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you're talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you'd like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You'll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.
The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.
Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.
If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.
Is it legal for a service to be called private when it is programmatically shared with law enforcement?
The amount of people in this thread that seem to think invasion of privacy is cool to police thought crime is honestly shocking. The subject and subject matter are completely irrelevant.
In addition, teachers are fucking people and venting and joking in private with close friends is sacrosanct.
The headline of this article should have mentioned the reason her communication was flagged was because she mentioned shooting the student or the school. When you send a text, or Snapchat message, you are stripping out a wide range of non-verbal communication including intent and seriousness. So when someone sends a message with the comment that they might shoot a student or the school there is no way to judge these things. The last thing Snapchat wants or needs is an actual school shooting occurring that can be traced back to the shooter actually mentioning their intent to do so on their platform. With no way to judge intent Snapchat had to have a way to address these concerns. If an actual shooting was prevented then Snapchat would be lauded. Otherwise it's spun like this article implying it's a breach of privacy.
The world with social media is much different than the world before it. It's changed the way people think, the types of things they think about and what they consider important. It therefore changes the way they act. Combine this with the ever growing surveillance state that intentionally wants to manipulate us and is able to do so at scale and speed and we find ourselves in the giant and dangerous mess we're in now.
Yeah no, this is trying to justify a surveillance-state.
The only reason Snapchat would give two shits is fear of lawsuits.
I'm not sure it's fear of lawsuits. We don't sue cell carriers for not monitoring text messages, and even if we did Snapchat's pockets are deep.
Snapchat isn't afraid of being sued... they're selling your data and may also assist the government identify "Anti-fa" agents.
You're right on both points.
It IS a breach of privacy.
Few people who use these apps expect to be surveiled. That may make them ignorant, but that doesn't change that this is a breach of their privacy.
Except Snapchat doesn't have to surveil its customers and we really don't want it to.
Does Apple surveil iMessages? Does your cell carrier need to monitor your text messages? Does it listen to your calls to see if you make terroristic threats?
Some bad things might be prevented if we "listened in" to all communications and then triggered a police response when something alarming was said. But doing so is ripe for abuse by those in power as well and that's why warrants are required before surveillance and the invasion of your privacy is allowed. No warrant was necessary here because Snapchat makes you accept the surveillance under its terms of use, which all apps and cell carriers could technically do. And your Amazon Alexas. We don't want that. Without privacy you don't have freedom.
People really need to quit acting like there's an expectation of privacy on what is essentially someone else's land. You're perfectly free to fedpost on your own damn service, but don't expect companies to be okay with you making the same kinds of "jokes" that hundreds of kids that went to commit mass shootings did. This isn't 2000, there are consequences to this kind of action.
So we should grant permission to our cell carrier to listen in on our calls and read our text messages too without warrant? Of course they'll sell your data too.
Don't give up your freedom and your constitutional right to privacy.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
