Technology

I work IT in schools. There is limited surveillance tools on college owned devices. Mainly logging of web traffic. Screens can be viewed when on campus network, not reachable off campus.

No one in our department has time to waste looking at web history or screens. Teachers don't bother to use it much either. We only look at it when directed by college executive or when I go in there at the end of term to clear the alerts.

I'd imagine most other schools are similar, no one gives a shit what kids are doing on their devices

You're pretty far off base here.

Just to clarify, the majority of active pedophiles are opportunistic, they go after those they have access to.

This is why every industry that has greater access to children, also has an greater number of pedophile scandals... It's a problem, and yeah, giving someone direct access via a computer to a child's digital life is a form of access that might be used opportunistically by such people.

I don't think you understand just how locked down modern school laptops are. They don't have access to Google snake, much less something like discord to chat with their friends. I semi-volenteer with my highschools library and I have to make tickets because some kids date/time was wrong and they didn't have the ability to fix it. We don't even have the ability to share PowerPoints anymore. The people that look on them are also the overworked IT guys that have to deal with these BS date/time tickets all day.
Teenagers are crafty and don't have respect for the technology provided to them. I've seen (on multiple occasions) my peers beat the screen of the free laptop repeatedly if it's too 'slow'.

I know that, you know that, many know that, but many don't. Imo they should be required to inform you, preferably with a splash screen on boot or something similar that says "monitored by XXXXX" or something. Especially for things like schools where it's more likely kids won't know it (and will be more likely to become privacy advocates for life from knowingly having theirs violated.)

That's fine.

But third parties should still be heavily limited on the information they can gather from just class work usage.

The first thing I did when I was issued a laptop for a job was check for monitoring software of any type. The second thing I did was become extremely suspicious when I couldn't find any. I suppose the rule is "most likely" or "more often than not" while also being "always assume".

I might have the exception to this. I’m able to dual boot my work laptop, as can the other engineers in my department. So it’s effectively a Linux machine under my exclusive administration. The only request from my IT department was how to format the host name.

I’m still not taking chances with that thing though, even when on my home network. The rules exist even if there’s a 99.99% chance they won’t be enforced. I have nothing to gain from doing nefarious shit on it just to prove a point, lol.

What are we monitoring? How kids get dressed, if they pick their nose while using the computer?

Blocking sites does not require on device "monitoring". Locking down a machine does not require monitoring. So why this invasive level of monitoring.

There's other ways - write it into the conditions of loan that it's not the school's responsibility to monitor student use when at home.

There are solutions that allow monitoring only on campus - both the monitoring person and the student need to be on-site for the software to contact a licensing server. No server contact=no monitoring.
And never bring 'AI' into it.

Our system flags key words for staff intervention. This has provided earlier support for suicidal students and earlier intervention for developing threats.