As part of an attempt to curb vaping, bullying, and unruly behavior in school restrooms, some educational institutions in the UK are turning to new technology — sensors capable of snooping on student conversations and detecting certain keywords in speech.
However, these measures are creating a significant rift in the debate over privacy rights.
These remote, digital sensors that look like smoke detectors, can be programmed to recognize select words through machine learning algorithms. Upon hearing these, they send alerts to specific members of the school staff. They are being marketed by companies such as Triton and Emergency Protection, both of which suggest these sensors can be used not only to monitor students but also to oversee staff incidents such as bullying among colleagues.
However, privacy advocates are pushing back. Madeleine Stone, a senior advocacy officer for Big Brother Watch, voiced her concerns by stating “secretly monitoring school bathrooms is a gross violation of children’s privacy and would make pupils and parents deeply uncomfortable,” continuing to highlight the unlikelihood of such surveillance being lawful and posing a clear risk to student safety.
In response to the privacy concerns, Triton defends their 3D Sense Pro Sensor, stating its aim is not to intrude on daily conversations, but to provide additional security against threats like bullying or sexual assault in these spaces.
The sensor, which has preloaded keywords, allows schools to add an additional 10 custom keywords.
These controversial sensors have been installed in several British schools.
Not to say it’s not a privacy concern. It absolutely is.
But surely it’s going to be about 3 seconds before kids start coming up with creative new slang for whatever terms they know the system is listening for. Cockney slang 2.0 for the digital age, if you will.
I hope they can even coordinate well enough to get most of their friends spamming it constantly by reciting all the keywords every time they go to take a piss. Hell. It’d be badass to leave an mp3 players just looping all the keywords taped to it. Like an audio throwie.
Every kid needs to read Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.
The kids absolutely will figure out the keywords that set it off and the listening devices will become useless, assuming they don’t get destroyed by vandals first.
Or they’ll just continuously say the words to fuck with staff. Boy who cried wolf but intentionally, if you will.
I’ll give it a few weeks before a bully puts laxative in some kid’s lunch, follows them to the bathroom, screams key words the moment they sit down to poop and runs away.
Que the “owww Mr Wrigley stop fucking my arse owewww it hurts!”
Or just keep saying the trigger words right before walking out…x100 students, all day
The more I hear about post Brexit UK stomping down on protesters, introducing more surveillance and now this bathroom snooper. It seems like we are inching towards what Georg Orwell imagined.
That’s because the conservatives treat 1984 as an instruction manual.
Send help.
They’ll really do everything except actually address bullying
Someone out there has the weirdest fetish.
You just preempted my comment. Mine wasn’t as funny as yours and now isn’t necessary. This really made my day. Thanks!
Rule 34
My school had a really good system. Instead of the toilets being in a closed room, they instead had an open floor plan with the sinks being clearly visible from the hallway. Obviously it was all cubicals, no urinals but it worked really well to stop this sort of thing. Seems like a much safer way to curb all those things listed than fucking spying on children.
It’s going to listen in on accident when someone is shitting their brains out cursing Taco Bell and staff will have to monitor said session to confirm it was only someone destroying the toilet.
At last, my plan has been put into motion. Now I will have the recording of a thousand cherubs peeing, which I will sum together into a tone so unique that it will take the audio world by storm.
You may have heard of white noise and pink noise. Now, get ready for yellow noise.
