Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “surveillance”
trapped between generative AI and student surveillance
- kudos:We’re getting to the end of the semester here at the University of Kentucky, which is my traditional time to get overly introspective about grading. There’s a lot on my mind at the end of this semester, but one thing that has popped into my head tonight and that I think will be quick to write about is a dilemma that I’m facing this semester, when I’ve had faced more suspicions about student use of generative AI than in any previous semester.
new publication: Canvas and student privacy awareness
- kudos:For the past couple of years, my colleague Dr. Meghan Dowell and I have been working on a paper on students’ awareness of what data the Canvas learning management system collects (and subsequently makes available to certain stakeholders). I’m a fan of Nick Proferes’s paper [Information Flow Solipsism in an Exploratory Study of Beliefs About Twitter] and have long wanted to do something similar related to LMSs. This is even more Meghan’s area of specialty than mine, though, so I was grateful that she was also interested in the subject and took the lead in turning this idea into reality.
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Duolingo is one of those apps I really loved once but now can’t see as anything but creepy adware. It’s hard to complain when it’s teaching kiddo more French than I ever managed to, but I still worry I’ve sold her soul to that little green owl.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research''
- kudos:It’s uncomfortable for me to think about how close my “digital traces” research is to surveillance and YOLO data mining. link to “Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for ‘Machine Learning Research’”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says'
- kudos:I stopped using Strava over five years ago when the stories were about secret military bases being identified through the service were coming out. link to “Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Real Monsters of Street Level Surveillance'
- kudos:This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween. link to “The Real Monsters of Street Level Surveillance”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Vigilant, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Biggest Sting Operation Ever, by Joseph Cox
- kudos:This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests. It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out.
surveillance (but not accountability) in school acceptable use policies
- kudos:It’s that time of year (again) for signing the acceptable use policy for kiddo’s school, and I’m again grumpy about a lot of the details in here. Some of these details are me being a nitpicky academic, like the use of the word “technology” to refer to digital technologies alone. Others strike me as more serious, though. Let’s take a look at this paragraph, listed under a “Roles and Responsibilities of Parents/Guardians” header:
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Amazon-Powered AI Cameras Used To Detect Emotions of Unwitting UK Train Passengers - Slashdot'
- kudos:This sucks on so many levels. link to “Amazon-Powered AI Cameras Used To Detect Emotions of Unwitting UK Train Passengers - Slashdot”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Cops Released a Car’s Travel History to a Total Stranger'
- kudos:ALPRs suck. link to “Cops Released a Car’s Travel History to a Total Stranger”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'PayPal is building an ad network based on your Venmo data'
- kudos:This is why I include nonsense descriptions for all my Venmo transactions. link to “PayPal is building an ad network based on your Venmo data”
- kudos:
I reject surveillance culture in my teaching, which means I don’t ever make a systematic effort to check for evidence of cheating or plagiarism, which just means that the obvious evidence I find anyway just makes me all the more angry.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'As The US Freaks Out About TikTok, It’s Revealed That The CIA Was Using Chinese Social Media To Try To Undermine The Gov’t There'
- kudos:Oh, so the moral panic is hypocritical, too. link to “As The US Freaks Out About TikTok, It’s Revealed That The CIA Was Using Chinese Social Media To Try To Undermine The Gov’t There”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ALPR Maker Flock Broke Laws Repeatedly While Installing Cameras, Courting Cop Shops'
- kudos:Flock provides the ALPRs here in Lexington, which makes this especially frustrating. link to “ALPR Maker Flock Broke Laws Repeatedly While Installing Cameras, Courting Cop Shops”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'N.S.A. Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says - The New York Times'
- kudos:Well, this sucks. Appreciate Ron Wyden’s diligence in this area. Gift link. link to “N.S.A. Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says - The New York Times”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'He Wanted Privacy. His College Gave Him None – The Markup'
- kudos:This is a really important read. It’s why educational technology researchers should be concerned about more than “does it improve learning?"—and why our understanding of edtech needs to include all of these platforms, not just the obvious stuff. link to “He Wanted Privacy. His College Gave Him None – The Markup”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI chatbots can infer an alarming amount of info about you from your responses | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Welp, this is scary. link to “AI chatbots can infer an alarming amount of info about you from your responses | Ars Technica”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Amazon’s ‘Neighborhood Watch’ Might Be Turning Police Officers Into ‘Reddit Moderators’ – The Markup'
- kudos:Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy. link to “Amazon’s ‘Neighborhood Watch’ Might Be Turning Police Officers Into ‘Reddit Moderators’ – The Markup”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Why a search engine that scans your face is dangerous : NPR'
- kudos:Facial recognition is the worst. link to “Why a search engine that scans your face is dangerous : NPR”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Team Firefox foreverrrrrr link to ‘Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome | Ars Technica’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '*privacy not included | Shop smart and safe | Mozilla Foundation'
- kudos:Well, this sucks. [link to ‘*privacy not included | Shop smart and safe | Mozilla Foundation’](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/what-data-does-my-car-collect-about-me-and-where-does-it-go/
- kudos:
I’m torn between how much I dislike the idea of a connected car and how easy it just now made it to get a question answered at the local dealer. I guess we wouldn’t agree to all this surveillance if it wasn’t actually useful sometimes.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'You Are Not Responsible for Your Own Online Privacy | WIRED'
- kudos:Some important—if disheartening—observations from Marwick. link to ‘You Are Not Responsible for Your Own Online Privacy | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Lexington KY police start using Fusus camera software | Lexington Herald Leader'
- kudos:Ew, gross, no. link to ‘Lexington KY police start using Fusus camera software | Lexington Herald Leader’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'JCPS approves $11.7M for AI weapons detection in schools'
- kudos:Guns in schools are bad, but adding surveillance to schools is not the solution. link to ‘JCPS approves $11.7M for AI weapons detection in schools’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras | WIRED'
- kudos:Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them. link to ‘Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Neighborhood Watch Out: Cops Are Incorporating Private Cameras Into Their Real-Time Surveillance Networks | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
- kudos:This sounds worrying to me. Surveillance can and will be abused, and we should be wary about embracing it on this scale. link to ‘Neighborhood Watch Out: Cops Are Incorporating Private Cameras Into Their Real-Time Surveillance Networks | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
- kudos:
Heading into finals, campus sent out a message about AI detection tools maybe not being trustworthy, which is great. However, this is in the context of these tools being wrapped into plagiarism detection software we already have access to, so they should say the same about it, too.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Tesla employees reportedly passed around personal videos from owners’ cars - The Verge'
- kudos:I had never thought of a car as a creepy surveillance device, but this is horrifying. link to ‘Tesla employees reportedly passed around personal videos from owners’ cars - The Verge’
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:To my own surprise, I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently, and having listened to Doctorow’s “Walkaway,” I decided to revisit his Little Brother series in audio form. Parts of the first book haven’t aged well (including some language that was bad enough to be edited out of the print version I have), and while I enjoy Doctorow’s opinions, they sometimes overwhelm the story here. That said, to quote TVTropes, some anvils are worth dropping, and the messages about privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties are as relevant as ever, I don’t know if I enjoyed the book as much as I did my first time through, but I still like it enough to give it four hearts.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare, and we ought to be concerned | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Important points in here. link to ‘ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare, and we ought to be concerned | Ars Technica’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI Wants To Help You Figure Out If Text Was Written By OpenAI; But What Happens When It’s Wrong? | Techdirt'
- kudos:Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'People Can’t Stop ‘Spotify Snooping’ on Friends, Exes and Crushes - WSJ'
- kudos:This is dumb and gross, and another reason I’ll never use Spotify. link to ‘People Can’t Stop ‘Spotify Snooping’ on Friends, Exes and Crushes - WSJ’
- kudos:
In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”
- kudos:
Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”