SoylentNews

Colleges are Turning Students’ Phones Into Surveillance Machines

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 29 2019, @03:04PM   
from the 1984-was-not-a-"how-to"-manual dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/us-colleges-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-devices-tracking-locations-of-hundreds-of-thou-2154310 :

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.

---

Original Submission

• Re:One thing I learned in college (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:25PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:25PM (#938401)

  Precisely who are these people?

  I'm not sure how that would help. Even if specific names were named, it would be anecdotal, and just as readily dismissed by your top-down authoritarian one-size-fits-all thinking.

  Even with multiple diagnosed learning disorders, significant brain damage, mental illness and a near complete inability to read materials that aren't interesting to me or generally manage my time, I was able to get through 6 years of combined under grad and graduate level work on my own.

  Good for you, but you're ignoring all of the people for whom that is not true.

  You're whole argument is based on a myth.

  I would say the same to you.

  "College isn't working for somebody " is code for they didn't do any of the work consistently and didn't seek any help.

  Maybe some of them didn't do any of the work consistently because college isn't a good environment for them, and they would be better served attaining their educations via other means? This is what I mean by ignoring all forms of evidence that college doesn't work for everyone.

  See, the thing is, I'm not claiming that college isn't right for anyone; I'm simply saying it isn't right for everyone. Your black-and-white thinking does not represent reality.

  Let's be clear, college isn't hard. You show up for class, do the assigned work and pass.

  Especially now that it's becoming increasingly controlled by corporations, increasingly geared towards simply pleasing employers, and increasingly focused on handing out as many degrees as possible. None of that is going to result in a quality education for the people who would otherwise be best served by the college system. Receiving a degree is thus not necessarily a sign of success; a high-quality education is a sign of success.

  These people for whom the system allegedly doesn't work are practically non-existent. They're mostly people who don't want the degree in the first place and make no effort to get help or do the work.

  I'm an employer working in software development and I have hired many autodidacts (as well as people with degrees). The vast majority of them knew that college and university wouldn't be right for them, and simply chose to not to attend to begin with. You, of course, don't see these people, because they're not even part of the system to begin with. So, people with personalities that would not interact well with the traditional schooling system often choose to opt-out in the first place. Even more troubling, anyone who is part of the system but who doesn't do well in the system is simply dismissed as irrelevant. That is selection bias.

  Getting a degree also doesn't equal getting a high-quality education. Education should be the goal, not degrees. Your priorities are out of order.

  The students that ultimately drop out aren't doing so because of the format, they're doing it because they didn't want the degree in the first place or their lives were upended outside of class.

  Sounds like the system wasn't working for those people, then, regardless of the reason.

  Parent