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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA boy wrote about his suicide attempt. He didn't realize his school's Gaggle software was watching
In the midst of a pandemic and a national uprising, Teeth Logsdon-Wallace was kept awake at night last summer by the constant sounds of helicopters and sirens.
For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis, who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplified the emotional distress he was experiencing as a result of gender dysphoria. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after he tried to kill himself. During that dark stretch, he spent his days in an outpatient psychiatric facility, where he listened to a punk song on loop that promised things would soon get better. Eventually they did.
Logsdon-Wallace, a transgender eighth-grader, has since graduated from weekly therapy sessions and is doing better, but that didnt stop school officials from springing into action after he wrote about his mental health. In a school assignment last month, he reflected on his suicide attempt and how the anthem by the band Ramshackle Glory helped him cope intimate details that wound up in the hands of district security.
The classroom assignment was one of thousands of Minneapolis student communications that got flagged by Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that saw rapid growth after the pandemic forced schools into remote learning. In an earlier investigation, the non-profit website The 74 analyzed nearly 1,300 public records from Minneapolis Public Schools to expose how Gaggle subjects students to relentless, round-the-clock digital surveillance, raising significant privacy concerns for more than 5 million young people across the country who are monitored by the companys algorithm and human content moderators.
But technology experts and families with first-hand experience with Gaggles surveillance dragnet have raised another issue: the service is not only invasive; it may also be ineffective.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/oct/12/school-surveillance-dragnet-suicide-attempt-healing
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This is just WRONG! Also, "Teeth"?
jimfields33
(15,769 posts)Lots of lessons on whats ok and whats not as far as technology. Well get the rough edges smoothed out.
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)The scenario where a school system gives children and teens computers to use in remote learning (which I imagine there was a lot of that) produces an interesting conundrum AFA what the student does with that computer, particularly during non-school hours.
It could be argued that the school should have the ability to monitor everything that's done on it, as they are, in a sense, 'potentially liable'.
I don't 'like it', mind you, but I think it could be argued it's given to you for education-related purposes only.