Schools are buying up surveillance technology to fight COVID-19
Schools have long flirted with surveilling students — but it could become commonplace
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, school districts were turning to surveillance technologies, often in the name of boosting campus security by tracking visitors or uncovering weapons or fighting truancy. One New York State school district began experimenting withfacial recognition technologybefore state legislatorshit pauseon the program, and dozens of schools have started to useBluetooth location tracking.
But the pandemic has brought a new wave of interest.The Wall Street Journal recently reportedon an AI-powered Motorola service for detecting mask compliance on video. Other schools aregiving students wearablesfor tracking whom they come in contact with, or offeringCOVID-screening apps.
Last month,TechCrunch reportedthat students at Albion College, a liberal arts school in Michigan, would be required to use a contact-tracing app. The app tracks students movements in real time. Using the app is mandatory during school hours, and students could face disciplinary action for not complying. (A “FAQ” sheetfrom Albion says officials will only use “location data for [contact] tracing in the event of a positive test.”)
Schools continuing remote learning also have a slate of surveillance technologies to purchase — including software that provides remote proctoring services,monitoring students as they take tests, or automatically tracking homework and attendance.
The technology may sound useful but can be a “blunt tool”
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, says software like location tracking can be “a pretty blunt tool”— not something that gives you the full picture.
Anapp that tells youwhether you came within six feet of someone diagnosed with COVID-19 maynot provide proper context—like if there was a wall of glass between you, she said. Similarly, the app might not be able to tell whether you were wearing a mask or face shield, or whether you were indoors or outdoors.
Cameras or tracking tools might also be installed during the pandemic, Levinson-Waldman said, but there’s no guarantee they won’t stay in schools far longer and wind up being used for something beyond their initial purposes. The technology could eventually be used to monitor for truancy or other disciplinary infractions, or even provide data to law enforcement.
Regardless of how the data is intended to be used, Levinson-Waldman said, the information collected can be extraordinarily personal.
“You’re getting into really sensitive issues if you’re identifying things like when are students in the bathroom, because that information gets more and more intimate,” she said.
Areport released this monthby the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project says any technologies adopted during pandemic school reopenings should take into account potential data hacking and other unforeseen uses of data, as well as students’ right to privacy from administrators, police, and even their parents.
“Persistent location monitoring of schoolchildren risks becoming yet another facet of the school-to-prison pipeline,” the report said, “providing law enforcement with unprecedented tracking capabilities for monitoring children of color.”
Some schools are doing without
There are schools focusing their efforts on more traditional testing and tracing methods. Duke University, for example, usesa “pool-testing” systemthat involves testing five samples at once. Other collegeshave takena similar approach.
At the University of Arizona, college officials aretesting dorm wastewater for signs of the virusand say they recently prevented a larger outbreak through the process. After a water sample from one dorm came back positive for the virus in August, officials tested everyone in the building and found two infected students who were then quarantined.
Public schools in New York City plan torandomly test10% of students and teachers to monitor for the virus as schools reopen. In Los Angeles, school officialsannounced a plan last monthto test 700,000 students in the coming months.
But those programs take substantial money and resources — making them, without additional federal help, out of reach for many schools.
There’s a need for “a national investment in effective contact tracing by culturally competent contact tracers from the community,” and to have them specially trained for working with kids, Fox Cahn, of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said.
Ultimately, he said, he trusts the humans to prevent outbreaks more than the machines.
“All of the questions that a well-trained contact tracer would ask to identify someone’s potential risk of exposure are missing from these sorts of mass tracking systems,” he said.
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupand was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
