Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

guest · Dec 25, 2019

Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands
December 24, 2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...chines-tracking-locations-hundreds-thousands/

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.

“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”
But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’ privacy on a massive scale.
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This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people’s activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize.

“Graduates will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems,” one commenter on the Slashdot message board said. “Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984.”
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Joanna Grama, an information-security consultant and higher-education specialist who has advised the Department of Homeland Security on data privacy [...]
She said she worries about school-performance data being used as part of a “cradle-to-grave profile” trailing students as they graduate and pursue their careers. She also questions how all this digital nudging can affect students’ daily lives.

“At what point in time do we start crippling a whole generation of adults, human beings, who have been so tracked and told what to do all the time that they don’t know how to fend for themselves?” she said. “Is that cruel? Or is that kind?”
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guest · Dec 29, 2019

How Should Students Respond To Their School's Surveillance Systems?
How To (Hypothetically) Hack Your School's Surveillance System
December 28, 2019
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/12/how-to-hypothetically-hack-your-schools-surveillance-system/

This week, hacktivist and security engineer Lance R. Vick tweeted an enticing proposition along with a gut-punch headline: “Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands,” read the Washington Post link.

Vick countered with an offer to students:

If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system.
The report revealed nearly instantaneous and sweeping adoption of smartphone-tracking platforms implemented in roughly 60 campuses, ranging from limited classroom attendance check-ins to pervasive 24/7 surveillance, mostly with fuzzy consent policies.

We’re always up for hacker class, so Vick supplied Gizmodo with a few theories for inquiring minds.
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noway · Dec 29, 2019

If the students are willing accomplices by carrying a device that is much the same as a GPS monitoring bracelet for sex offenders it is their own fault and they deserve what they get. They can ask their parents if that ever happened to them, and why not.

guest · Dec 31, 2019

University tech presents growing privacy concern for students, educators
December 30, 2019
https://edscoop.com/university-tech-presents-growing-privacy-concern-educators/

But as these technologies are increasingly adopted and data collection becomes an institutional priority, many call attention to the potential for misuse and harm to students.
And as the trend of implementing technology tools to benefit students continues, the challenge of tying both privacy and assistance together is also expected to remain.

Brandan Aldrich, chief data officer for the California State University system, noted at an education conference in October that “modern colleges are generating more data than they ever have in history,” and that they can use data to positive ends, such as keeping students on track to graduate, for example.
But Ann Nagel, a university privacy officer at the University of Washington, pointed out that “we have a responsibility to be thinking about privacy.”

Students also don’t always know they are being monitored so closely, Jones said, noting an absence of any “culture of informed consent.”

“These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a student population because it serves their interests,” said. Kyle M. L. Jones, an Indiana University assistant professor who researches student privacy, told the Washington Post that he thinks universities are putting their own priorities ahead of students’.
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guest · Jan 28, 2020

Mizzou students required to install location tracking app so college can 'pinpoint' them
According to the vice provost, students are required to participate in the tracking
January 29, 2020
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14274

New students at the University of Missouri will be required to participate in a tracking program designed to measure and enforce class attendance, according to a new report from The Kansas City Star.

Despite privacy concerns, officials defended the decision as one to the benefit of students, as the school's athletics department has already been using the same app, SpotterEdu, to track certain student-athletes.

“A student will have to participate in this recording of attendance,” Jim Spain, vice provost for undergraduate studies at MU, said in a statement to The Kansas City Star.
"We only care if students are in class during class; no GPS tracking means we can't locate them anywhere else," the app's website states.

However, the app is not incapable of tracking students' locations outside the classroom.
"From labs to auditoriums our technology can expand to cover any size of space accurately and precisely," the app's website adds.
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mirimir · Jan 28, 2020

Hey, but it's for their own good

But then, they could just grade based on testing, and let the clueless fail out.

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