When surveillance goes beyond the limits and jeopardizes the safety of students. It’s happening in Walnut, a municipality in eastern Los Angeles County.
Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) is one of California’s largest technical and career colleges. Founded in 1945, more than 26,000 students come to take classes there today. It is now a huge playground for monitoring and data collection. Future graduates thus find themselves immersed in the heart of a colossal control system: software monitoring of exams or reading of license plates, these technologies are used to their maximum.
The consequences on the lives of students are numerous and this system of supervision influences the decisions of school administrators, professors and even law enforcement. An infrastructure with Orwellian overtones, which proves once again that certain American states are ready to develop mountains of ingenuity to control their youth. A state of affairs which is reminiscent of the censorship organized in school libraries with ChatGPT. A brief overview of this completely unimaginable security landscape.
Smile, you are being analyzed
One of the San Antonio College students, Eric Nativitad, 32, is at the forefront of this gigantic monitoring mechanism. His day is analyzed from morning to evening: companies like Instructure, Google and Facebook monitor his online activities and constantly collect his personal data. T2 Systems (a parking management solutions company) and the campus police keep an eye on his every car trip. GAFAM are no longer the only ones to feed on this information.
“ There isn’t a moment of the day when all this doesn’t stop occupying my mind. », he says, disillusioned. Eric was afraid throughout the semester of being subjected to the facial detection software used for remote proctoring by Mt. SAC. An omnipresence of espionage which also worries his fellow students.
Academic freedom or digital prison?
The official reason for these measures: the optimization of teaching. In reality, it is quite oppressive for the students of Mt. SAC. A software used by it, Canvas, allows teachers to adjust their educational programs. In practice, however, this results in the transmission of this data to third-party companies. The general atmosphere is one of distrust, and students adapt their behavior to avoid being noticed by these numerous tools. Intrusive and anxiety-provoking, this omnipresent vigilance is difficult to bear on a daily basis for students. Trading the freedom to study for permanent constraint comes at a high price.
The guerrilla war on confidentiality, a losing battle in advance?
Faced with this situation, resistance is being organized. Natividad, and others of his classmates, are pleading for change. Initiatives exist, but they are in the minority. At the University of Michigan, the ViziBLUE website was created in 2020. It allows students to access and view their information collected by the institution. Other campuses have also been the site of protests to combat the use of surveillance software without their knowledge. In particular against a program which collected data through the use of facial recognition and located their homes.
Noah Apthorpe works at Colgate University as an assistant professor of computer science. It focuses in particular on themes such as confidentiality and the consequences of data collection within universities. From his point of view, the effects are very harmful for students: “ We are used to an environment where everything is systematically recorded, which makes our ability to make changes very complex to implement. “. Canvas, for example, collects information and is used to make profiling students in order to draw up typical profiles.
The finding is very alarming and the situation at Mt. SAC raises crucial ethical questions. At the moment, the balance between the benefits of technology and respect for the right to privacy is largely unfavorable for academics. To what extent are these institutions capable of extending these systems? What will their limit be? What is certain is that current practices deserve to be re-evaluated as their long-term impacts are unknown.
As George Orwell wrote in 1949 in his renowned novel,1984 : “ they couldn’t take your thoughts away from you. Thought was the last domain of freedom “. In the not-so-distant past, our thoughts remained a bastion, a refuge considered inviolable. However, they now find themselves under the scrutiny of tools that constantly scrutinize them and endanger our intellectual autonomy.
Source : The Markup
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