[dkoubsky]

At my high school - a private prep school - we are required to have iPads. All of us were required to install a monitoring program that has access to most of what we do on the iPads (internet searches, messages, etc.). To my knowledge, it hasn't been used to incriminate anyone but it still makes me wary.

[DoreenMichele]

It doesn't need to incriminate anyone. It's sufficient to just intimidate everyone into conforming to whatever expectations are laid out. It's actually more corrosive to just prevent any "undesirable" behavior than to catch people who are "guilty."

[blattimwind]

(One of) the key effects here is the chilling effect.

[DoreenMichele]

Yes, you train people to be scared to Google it and then progressively train them to be scared to think about the question for fear that it will somehow leave tracks on the internet that can be found.

[BoiledCabbage]

There will be an entire generation of kids for whom spying on everything they do on their computer till age18 will have been normalized.

What happens when they start participating in denocracy. It's hard to imagine they'll have the same expectations of personal privacy after that.

[eikenberry]

This is just their school issued Ipad. They'd hopefully have a personal computing device of some sort that they'd be free to do what they want on. Assuming they don't have helicopter parents who have to control every aspect of their kids lives, then they're just screwed.

[ams6110]

Right -- it's the school's iPad, and they can set the terms of use.

Do schools still have libraries? They did when I went, and you can be sure they curated the set of books in the catalog and kept records of who checked out which ones.

[jstarfish]

Even the public libraries started disclosing checkout history to agencies with the advent of the PATRIOT act.

[jacobolus]

https://www.aclu.org/librarians-nsl-challenge

[tzs]

On the positive side, maybe there will be an entire generation of kids who learn in school the importance of using your own devices instead of devices issued to you and owned by others when you do things that you wish to keep private.

Better to learn that lesson in school, when the mistakes that teach it to you will be confined to your juvenile records, than to learn it as an adult when it can follow you for the rest of your life.

[EGreg]

You mean like Social Media has already done to two generations? LOL

If anything, more people reshare criticism more publicly than ever, even as they are being surveilled.

Admittedly, the difference is that our society thinks it's OK to punish kids and teenagers to make them get in line. That's the actual problem and the solution is not to have them hide their thoughts as much as to respect them more as human beings.

[blattimwind]

Well, punishment rarely works as a method of education/parenting, and even if it does it's practically assured to not be the most effective method. Of course, some people remain who think even corporal punishment is OK for kids, but then again those are the kind of person you wish don't have kids anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[jstarfish]

I grew up with the knowledge that everything I did was monitored, given the nature of my parents employment.

All it led to was a lifetime of learning how to improve my opsec and now I work in the field myself.

Continuous improvement!

[jrazavian]

Just to clear up some confusion, you are likely referring to MDM software like MobileIron, Intune, or AirWatch. MDM software CANNOT see personal messages, photos, or access your own personal apps. Schools (and companies) use MDM software to inventory devices, push profiles to simplify things like VPN access, SSO, and email configuration. It is also used to to push school related applications to the device and sometimes for remote diagnostics and support. IT departments and school districts are as uninterested in your personal information as you are in them having it. No need to worry.

[nitwit005]

I'm kind of glad this sort of thing didn't exist when I was in high school. I'd have "borrowed" a teacher's ipad and started searching for child porn on their browser.

When I was in high school, my history teacher complained that he wrote down "caracas" (the city) as his password on some form for the IT people, but they entered his password as "carcass", assuming that he'd spelled the word wrong. Which, of course, meant that he'd told an entire class his password.

[c22]

More than that, he let the entire class know they could find everyone's password by digging through the IT people's recycling.