Is It a Good Idea to Have a Computer Monitoring System in School?

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Sally Kohn: We've been talking about the surveillance of students in schools. She says there's a wide range of technologies that fall under that category. These systems, she says, can see everything that a student is looking at if they're browsing. They also have the ability to turn on a student's camera on or off and monitor their social media accounts.Kohn: There are large pockets of populations who don't want students to have access to this information. And these systems potentially rob them of all those things.

Paris Marx is joined by Chris Gilliard to discuss the push to expand surveillance technologies in schools during the pandemic and in response to school shootings, and why they’re making life worse for students without addressing the problems they claim to solve.

Chris Gilliard is Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council at a recurring columnist at Wired. Follow Chris on Twitter at @hypervisible.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Chris recently wrote about why school surveillance won’t protect kids from shootings.
Chris and David Golumbia wrote about luxury surveillance for Real Life.
Pia Ceres wrote about how students’ school devices are still tracking what they do on them.
Amazon is launching a new show called “Ring Nation” to make Ring surveillance videos seem less invasive.
Studies by the Center for Democracy and Technology have found negative effects from surveillance on student expression and increasing their contact with police.
After nine members of Axon’s AI ethics board resigned, plans for a taser drone in schools seem to still be inching forward.
Todd Feathers reported on how school monitoring tools could flag searches for sexual and reproductive health resources.
Pasco County in Florida deployed a predictive policing system targeting children.
Some books mentioned: David Noble Progress Without People and Forces of Production, and Dan Greene wrote The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope.