Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them.

This sounds worrying to me. Surveillance can and will be abused, and we should be wary about embracing it on this scale.

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.

I had never thought of a car as a creepy surveillance device, but this is horrifying.

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.

Important points in here.

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.

This is dumb and gross, and another reason I’ll never use Spotify.

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.”

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.”

Glad this story is still getting attention, because it so neatly demonstrates why facial recognition is scary. We shouldn’t tolerate this level of surveillance—by private or public actors.

Hey, look, workplace surveillance doesn’t work.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article. I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head:

I see a worrying future for edtech ahead, and I’m not sure the academic discipline is adequately prepared for it.

I have written council representatives about this more than anything else, and yet I suspect that it will go through again without a fuss. This isn’t the worst form of surveillance, but it is still surveillance, pure and simple.

It is fun to see all my neighbors’ Halloween decorations tonight. It is less fun to see how many of them have Ring doorbells capturing my comings and goings.

I hate that there’s a need for articles like this, but I’m glad WIRED is putting them together.

There is so much of both horrible and hopeful in this story. The way we’re normalizing surveillance is really worrying, and I’m glad some people are fighting back.

Lot of worrying stuff in here. Edtech needs to take surveillance tech more seriously, because the two are increasingly simultaneous.

This week, I’m hurriedly putting together some revisions for a book chapter on data ethics that I’ve been working on for an open access volume on ethics in educational technology. I’m excited about the volume, and I’ve really loved writing the chapter, so it’s kind of fun to be doing these revisions, even if I waited for the last minute to do them. One reviewer suggestion that I’m particularly grateful for is to elaborate on a sentence I wrote arguing that “learning management systems allow us to monitor students in invasive ways that would be unimaginable in a face-to-face context.

I had heard about this kind of software at a conference last year, but reading about it just makes it scarier.

I missed the vertical integration aspect of this in earlier reporting I’ve read. It makes this story even worse.

This is a gross idea for a TV show, and I’m glad people are pushing back against it.

Caring about privacy ought to be common sense. It’s difficult to push back, but that doesn’t mean those of us who do are crazy.

Americans should be more worried about the NSA than they are.

It isn’t that TikTok doesn’t pose a real threat, it’s that it’s not alone in doing so. In particular, I appreciate that this article points out that U.S. border agents REGULARLY SEARCH COMPUTERS AND SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS. So, yes, raise concerns, but be consistent instead of creating a moral panic around thus one app (which, by the way, would be a privacy threat even if it were totally owned by a U.

What a story. I knew how awful the TSA could be to passengers, but I never knew how bad it also was for its own employees.

Well, here’s some happy news! I hope this ruling sticks.

I’ve been grumpy about ClassDojo all week, and this is the only thing that’s made me feel better about it—BECAUSE THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE.

These numbers sound great, but what cost are we paying? I’m not talking about the $70,000, I’m talking about the hard to quantify costs of surveillance—which, as the ACLU of KY points out, are likely to disproportionately target communities of color. Except we can’t know that because the city won’t tell us where the cameras are.

I’ve been blogging about ClassDojo enough over the past few weeks that I think it’s time for a quick recap before sharing some of the latest developments. I heard about ClassDojo being used schoolwide back in late July and started wondering what approach I should take as both a student’s parent and an edtech researcher. On Monday of this week, I talked to kiddo’s teacher about it and wrote up some thoughts the next day about teachers’ diminished agency in the realm of edtech.

Such a bad idea. Normalizing Ring won’t make it any better—only worse.

I really will get back to blogging on other subjects sometime soon, but here’s an email I just sent to kiddo’s principal raising some concerns I have going into the school year. I’m not sure what will come of this—and I’m not at all sure this was the right email to write—but in the off-chance it’s helpful for someone, I thought I’d post about it here. Dear Principal [so-and-so], We are very excited to be joining the VPE community this year: Our daughter is excited to be starting kindergarten, and we are happy to see how supportive, welcoming, and organized everyone has been.

Compelling example of the need for digital privacy in a post-Row world.

Some really worrying privacy implications in this kind of edtech—and edtech as a discipline doesn’t care nearly enough about this kind of thing. Makes me worried as a scholar and a parent.

Who is allowed to watch the watchmen? This is why I’m grumpy about Lexington being hush hush about its new automated license plate readers—it sets a precedent for secretive use of even more invasive surveillance.