Spending Too Long Pooping At School? There’s A (Government) App For That

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the early-adopters-should-be-forced-to-form-a-human-centipede dept

There’s a vast difference between what the government thinks it should know vs. what it’s actually entitled to know. And when the government decides more surveillance is needed, the most frequent targets are non-citizens (even if they’re legal residents) and children.

Children are vulnerable. In the name of protecting children, the government often exploits the innate vulnerability of children who are not afforded the full constitutional protection adults are given. Lower the right to privacy and you can get away with about anything.

To wit:

• The Glendale (CA) school district declared it would retain a third-party service to do “round the clock” monitoring of student’s (obviously) off-campus social media activities.
• With some students still utilizing distance learning as a result of a global pandemic, schools feel they’re entitled to access everything pertaining to distanced students, including psychiatric records and (yes, again) their social media activities.
• The trade-off for not being in school is being treated like a cheater. Eye tracking, key logging, mouse click examination, how fast you do or don’t scroll… all grounds for suspicion of cheating according to test proctoring software/apps/extensions.
• Schools hoping to head off shootings are investing in tech (using your tax dollars) that mistake coughing and slammed locker doors as gunshots.
• Legislators in several states are forcing educators to somehow “verify” a student’s sexual identity before allowing them to participate in sports programs.

This is on top of strip search after strip search after 850 aggressive fondlings of high school students (including breasts and genitals) performed by school administrators or their favorite proxies, “school resource officers.”

Students appear to be little more than prisoners school administrators graciously allow to return to their homes between classes. There’s apparently nothing we won’t subject minors to in the name of education, as Joseph Cox reports for Motherboard.

e-HallPass, a digital system that students have to use to request to leave their classroom and which takes note of how long they’ve been away, including to visit the bathroom, has spread into at least a thousand schools around the United States.

The system has some resemblance to the sort of worker monitoring carried out by Amazon, which tracks how long its staff go to the toilet for, and is used to penalize workers for “time off task.” It also highlights how automated tools have led to increased surveillance of students in schools, and employees in places of work.

Ah, the dystopian industrial complex, but now for kids. It takes the post-fascist ideals of Amazon’s brand of capitalism (i.e., “Work will set you free”) and applies it to children, tracking every moment spent “off task” to determine whether using the restroom “too often” (whatever the fuck that means) to apply discipline.

Feels bad, man. But if you think those helping the system be The System have any qualms about their contribution to the treatment of students as objects, you’re in for a bit of a shock. The company marketing this questionable “service” seems to think it’s schools that are falling behind by not purchasing third-party restroom tracking.

Brian Tvenstrup, president of Eduspire, told the outlet that the company’s biggest obstacle to selling the product “is when a school isn’t culturally ready to make these kinds of changes yet.”

I’m sure being greeted with questions like “what the actual fuck” and “how did you get in my office” must be disheartening to Eduspire and its salespersons. It also must be tough to explain how the word “inspire” got folded into this unfortunate corporate name, considering all the company provides is ways to destroy trust between students and educators.

On top of tracking bathroom visits, the software also provides school administration with ways to prevent students from interacting with each other or otherwise limit use of hall passes. And that’s all on top of the restroom monitoring I can’t seem to recall any educators (note: not school administrators) expressing an interest in obtaining.

The “service” provided here simply duplicates what teachers already know: which students seem to obtain hall passes more often than others. If this created problems, it’s nothing that could not be addressed by educators or students’ parents.

All the purchase of third-party spyware does is allow administrators to plausibly deny responsibility. After all, a computer thing told them to do it. They certainly wouldn’t have done it on their own. And, as the Excel spreadsheet (or whatever output options Eduspire provides) clearly shows (using specifically-tailored output), your child is a bathroom outlier. And since their restroom visits fall outside the mean, things must be done, Mr./Mrs. Parent of Said Student. I’m sorry but our hands are tied.

Hey, clever people out there: stop making bullshit like this. Maybe create a BTFSTTG app that gives students ways to generate junk data for intrusive collections like these that will overwhelm administrators with false positives until they finally decide it’s not worth spending (other people’s) money for. That would definitely be preferable to acting as virtual hall monitors while lowering students’ resistance to always-on surveillance of their activities.

Filed Under: children, dystopia, e-hallpass, for the children, monitoring, students, surveillance, tracking
Companies: e-hallpass, eduspire