Perspective.
Takeaways from our investigation on AI-powered school surveillance
Thousands of American schools are turning to AI-powered surveillance technology for 24/7 monitoring of student accounts and school-issued devices like laptops and tablets.
The goal is to keep children safe, especially amid a mental health crisis and the threat of school shootings. Machine-learning algorithms detect potential indicators of problems like bullying, self-harm or suicide and then alert school officials.
But these tools raise serious questions about privacy and security. In fact, when The Seattle Times and The Associated Press partnered to investigate school surveillance, reporters inadvertently received access to almost 3,500 sensitive, unredacted student documents through a records request. The documents were stored without a password or firewall, and anyone with the link could read them.
Here are key takeaways from the investigation.
Tools & Techniques. (Free trial on desktop version.)
https://www.bespacific.com/diffchecker/
DiffChecker
“I recently discovered a pretty amazing website called DiffChecker. It compares files and visually highlights any differences. You can use it to compare texts you paste right into the browser window, or you can upload documents to compare. It accepts Word docs, pdfs, spreadsheets and image files. To find the differences between two versions of a website, first you’ll have to convert them into txt files. Find an old capture in the Wayback Machine, right click to view page source, then save as a txt file. Then do the same for the live version of the site. A website’s html/css code may not include data files of course – those may be pulled from a background database you can’t access. I’m not saying it will work for every website, but it’s worth a try. The developers at DiffChecker are very responsive too, they quickly answer questions.” Via Marie Concannon Head, Government Information & Data Archives University of Missouri.
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