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Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands
| As if we needed any more proof that colleges are small scale authoritarian governments
| So if people leave the bluetooth function off, as they should, they get marked absent? That's stupid.
| What if a student doesn't have a phone? Or what if theirs breaks? Students would have to be able to get free phones from the university, or be able to "sign in" some other way.
| Next Levels:
- implant students chips, which do the "login"
- eventually give them electric shocks if they behave wrong
- of course it's all "voluntary", except not having this chip will cost you credits ("do you have something to hide?")
- this chip may be reused by employers on the job market or at work (e.g. joining/founding unions or labour councils gives negative credits)
- Also insurances and banks could use that chip to "improve their service" (=businesses)
| It's easy to break this system by corrupting it. Just let some rich students pay poorer ones to boost their "attendance points" with this app. They need no education at all, since they have rich relatives to rely on (they can even become president that way, see Bush jr. & Trump) Digitalization doesn't break class society (anymore). It's rather manifesting it.
| >>614106
Not according to a HN comment:
>[Not if] they are doing deep packet inspection or analyzing your browser through a wifi login portal
See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21880671
| >>614140
>Digitalization doesn't break class society (anymore). It's rather manifesting it.
that's an interesting take for a /new/ thread
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| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/24/colleges-are-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-machines-tracking-locations-hundreds-thousands/
>When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”
>And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too.