TL;DR don't assume privacy on a device you don't own. It belongs to the school/your employer, not you.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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I don't think the responsibility is on the children for assuming they have privacy on a school-issued device; surveillance often happens without transparency, and it's reasonable to not expect words like "gay" or "trans" in your writing to automatically be flagged and sent to administrators.
While it's great to educate people on the threats and the ways to mitigate them as individuals, there are policy choices being made here that need to change and the focus should be on how we can achieve that.
true. don't assume privacy on a device you do own, either.
I have set things up to the degree that I can safely assume that my device is private because I severed so many data connections. But most device users can't assume the same of their Microsoft and Google spyware devices. To learn more, check out pewdiepie's more recent videos, he has a good summary of the issues we face as a society.
Last year, a student in Minneapolis was outed when school administrators contacted their parents after a surveillance software flagged LGBTQ keywords in their writing, and schools’ abilities to screen students’ writings are becoming more and more invasive.
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A recent survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology showed that 81 percent of teachers report their schools are now using surveillance software to monitor students. One particular software used by schools around the country is Gaggle, which surveils school computers and student accounts. The use of Gaggle has resulted in the constant monitoring of students through their Gmail and Microsoft Office accounts, even when at home using personal devices. Gaggle even monitors in real time the content being written by students on Google Docs.
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Gaggle flags the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” and “transgender” as sexual content that is reported to human reviewers at the company to determine if it should be passed along to school staff. Gaggle’s CEO, Jeff Patterson, defended the policy of flagging LGBTQ content as a means to protect students from bullying.
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Prior to the pandemic, 43 percent of schools had device distribution programs; now, 86 percent do.
reminder that "parental rights" is the reason why leelah alcorn isn't with us anymore
I don't understand why people keep having kids when everything is getting so much worse for people at every stage of our lives.
Hope is why
Hope through ignorance is just stupidity
Blind cynicism is walking to your death.
what hope?
The same hope that kept us alive as a species through genetic bottlenecks. You have given up, stop dragging those who haven't broken down with us.
please don't keep a personal diary in google docs...