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from the 1984-was-not-a-"how-to"-manual dept.
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."
Short-range phone sensors and campuswide Wi-Fi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyse their conduct or assess their mental health.
But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilise students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.
In response we have:
How to (Hypothetically) Hack Your School's 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.
We're always up for hacker class, so Vick supplied Gizmodo with a few theories for inquiring minds.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:22PM (1 child)
The people working on the campus portal app were asked for that feature. They flatly refused, told the boss that it was unethical, the informed the unions (yeah we have different unions depending on your diploma, it's a weird kind of caste system) and that was it. We never heard about it afterwards.
Now try the same thing without union protection, you'll become a pariah if you somehow manage to keep your job.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:42PM
It's not really a caste system, different unions tend to specialize in different types of work. I used to be in the SEIU and it was a bit of a mess as the nurses, janitors and security personnel didn't always have much alignment. The nurses made the most and the union focused more on their issues. In many ways, it would have been better had the nurses been separated from the janitors and security personnel as it would have removed the skew.
If you look at some large unions, the types of workers covered can be rather diverse, but having diverse workers can lead to problems like this where there's a built in incentive to focus more on some of the workers than others.