French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes
from the in-school-we-learn-how-to-be-spied-on dept
A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases.
Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student sitting at home had access to a wealth of knowledge to buttress what they may have actually retained from remote instruction.
Leveling the playing field was the goal. In practice, that meant turning the most sacrosanct of private places — students’ homes and bedrooms — into heavily surveilled spaces… all in the interest of preventing cheating.
Laptop cameras monitored rooms and students’ movements during testing. Internet connections often contributed more to passing grades than students’ knowledge as educators (and their preferred tech partners) viewed inconsistent or dropped connections as indicators of attempted cheating. Malware deliberately installed by schools monitored internet usage before, during, and after tests.
A bedroom is not a classroom, even if that’s where the educating is taking place temporarily due to pandemic restrictions. But that’s how it was perceived and a bunch of opportunistic spyware purveyors rushed to fill the perceived “fairness” void with surveillance software that even the most inveterate stalker might consider too invasive.
Proctorio was on the forefront of this education-adjacent bedroom surveillance. It was particularly enthusiastic about stripping students of their privacy. When it was criticized for going too far, it went further, issuing legal threats and bogus DMCA takedown notices to its detractors.
What was briefly considered acceptable by one set of government employees has been rejected by other government employees. In September 2022, an Ohio state court ruled that scans of students’ rooms during remote learning violated the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches.
Respondus was the test proctoring spyware on the receiving end of that decision. Another competitor in the incredibly invasive field has been hit with an adverse judicial decision, this one originating in France. Karen Cullo delivers the details via the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.
TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.
Yeah, that’s a problem. Government entities can get away with some rights violations as long as they have a “compelling” (in the legal sense of the word) reason for doing so. Preventing students from cheating on tests ain’t it, though. Cheating on classwork has always been a thing. Just because it may now happen in kids’ own bedrooms doesn’t mean the government’s intrusion is justified.
But the legal battle isn’t over yet. This ruling basically says the case can proceed because the court believes the plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged governmental abuse of their rights. More evidence will be needed to ensure a final opinion — one that will hopefully side with students and their privacy. Just because an unforeseen event made things more difficult for schools doesn’t mean they’re allowed to force things to return to something approaching “normal” by any means necessary.
Filed Under: anti-cheat software, france, privacy, remote learning, schools, surveillance
Companies: testwe
Comments on “French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Educators definitely asked for this.
That is a ridiculous statement. The teachers unions absolutely without question asked for schools to be shut down.
Re: Oh, please
That is a ridiculous comment, from a non-serious person who apparently has a hard-on toward teachers and/or unions.
Everybody with a brain knew that in the face of a deadly, highly contagious virus, there was no way that in-person schooling could continue.
And only a very stupid or very disingenuous person could pretend that the “this” in the statement was “schools shutting down” and not “deadly epidemic”.
Re:
Just like the cowards who asked to vacate the slopes of an erupting volcano.
What's stupid about recitation by rote?
There are three types of knowledge, and possessing “anything that can be trivially looked up” isn’t anything to be proud of, yet so-called “educators’ think this represents “successful education.” It is not, nor is memorizing facts easily looked up.
The second is the “how” which is teaching how to resolve something. Long division, D=RT, MPG, etc. BUT WITH ONE HAND TIED BEHIND YOUR BACK. That means “Sure, solve this problem but don’t use that tool in your backpack or your pocket. It’s ok to DERIVE the slide-rule and then use it but don’t dare pull out a fully functioning calculator. Can’t use that tool. The excuse of ineffective “educators” is that if stranded on a desert island you won’t have your calculator with you. Fortunately on that same island I won’t have some self-important “educator wannabe” giving me tasks like calculating amortization tables or integrating areas under fencepole lines.
Finally there’s real knowledge, which can’t be easily looked up, nor calculated by that machine in your machine. That knowledge, when provided by an educator changes the student in a process called learning. It can’t be bypassed by “cheating”, rewards nothing to the so-called “educator” who can’t help the student achieve this learning, and is harder to test for. THIS is where real education happens, and WHY real educators (not “people employed as such” but rather those who “cause and help cause that”) thrive.
If a student can’t use a tool in his/her pocket, an “educator” shouldn’t get to use an all-seeing spy video surveillance system. Education has been around for thousands of years. So has cheating. Yet despite all that, the Einsteins of the world manage to succeed.
Our standards are wrong, and allowing the idiots to surveil the bored in order to keep their jobs while doing less and less isn’t going to fix that. “Oh but teachers make hardly any money.” Yes, and for failing to educate perhaps that’s where the solution should start impacting the problem, not changing the system to reward ineptitude.
Re:
Oh look, another person with a hard-on about teachers.
Never mind that public education has been deliberately, chronically, and criminally underfunded. No, it’s all the fault of those teachers (oh wait, we’ll call them educators, and put the word in quotes to be extra snarky).
I honestly don’t know why ANYBODY would go into teaching at this point; If it were me I’d say “Fuck you, take care of your own fucking brats.”
Re:
Teachers no longer have much if any choice in what is to be taught as conservatives decided that they would decide what is taught and created tests to see if what they wanted taught was actually being taught.
So teachers were forced to “teach to the test” by the state standards and left little room to teach critical thinking or more interesting things.
Nice post by the way. I loved the article very much. It was so informative and interesting