Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines, tracking hundreds of thousands

[dalton99a]

https://www.boston.com/news/education/2019/12/24/spotteredu

Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands
By Drew Harwell
The Washington Post

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies 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, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.

“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”

Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’ privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

[quakerboy]

1. Huh.

In my day they just gave us a card with a scannable code, and made us scan in everywhere.

A few questions, born out of that experience...
What about the students who dont have phones
Or the ones who claim not to have phones
Or the ones who acquire burner phones and pass them between friends and classmates on the regular in order to get attendance points?


Cause a cheap cell with an app in a pocket in a crowd of 340 people is much easier to produce than a person holding a card with a picture that is clearly not that of the person holding it. Especially if they have multiple cards, and have to find a way to scan in multiple times without being noticed by the person holding the scanner.

[Beartracks]

2. 50 people show up with backpacks, but 340 "attend."

[exboyfil]

3. Pay $12 to $40 K a year for these classes

and don't bother to show up?

My father in law used to give a quiz every period for his large lecture. Just enough points to make a letter grade difference at the end. He was also known to slide a few points to those who turned in the majority of the quizes.

This whole idea of tracking you with your phone is disturbing. I only recently started carrying a cell phone with tracking technology, and I have been disturbed to see requests to rate places that the phone shouldn't even know I had been. I disabled the Facebook app on it already. I am going to try to figure out how to disable this tracking as well. I still like to access Maps, but at what cost? Time to go back to a dumb GPS.

[pazzyanne]

4. Warning from George Orwell comes to mind:

"Big brother is watching".

[Throck]

6. O Brave New World.

Huxley's "Brave New World" should be co-read as a companion book for "1984". There are components of both books in the emerging dystopian present.

[pazzyanne]

8. ...

[Throck]

5. On a weekly basis I attach my phone to the dog's collar.

.....and let her run. It was funny for awhile until she started ordering her own treats on my Amazon app.

[ProfessorGAC]

7. "You Will Become One With The Borg"

This is happening while DOZENS of universities are promoting their on-line degrees?

So they want to make people to show up, but they don't want to make people show up.

Got it!