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Following a report from Human Rights Watch, The Public Ministry of São Paolo began an investigation to find out whether government education platforms and services collected students' personal data and sent it to adtech companies in violation of the General Data Protection Law. Article: São Paolo ministry investigates education websites for dataveillance Publication: G1Writer: Arthur Stabile
Content Type: Examples
Education experts and publishers in Brazil are warning of the negative consequences of a decision by the São Paolo state government to replace textbooks with ebooks for students over 14 starting in 2024. Many students have no Internet access, and publishers argue it will irreparably damage the testbook industry.Article: Brazilian educators oppose ebook replacement for textbooks Publication: Phys.org Writer: Phys.org
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After an in-person auction in São João let Brazilian technology companies bid for a contract to supply facial recognition technology to the public school system. PontoID, which won the $162,000 contract, began secretly rolling out the technology without informing parents or students in advance. The goal was to help track school attendance; parents would receive a text message when students arrive and leave school. In some towns, more than 80% of the population are of African descent; facial…
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The Court of Appeals for British Columbia rejected the claim made by whistleblower Ian Linkletter that linking to freely available materials from the remote proctoring company Proctorio was legitimate criticism. The company has a history of attacking those who criticise it and its products. Linklater, while working as Learning Technology Specialist at the University of British Columbia in 2020, issued a number of criticisms of its approach on Twitter, and linked to "unlisted" (public but not…
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An administrative court in Montreil, France issued a preliminary ruling ordering the Paris-based Distance Learning Institute to suspend its use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which uses facial recognition and algorithmic analysis to monitor students.Video and sound analysis track students' eye movements and their surroundings, a practice the court ruled disproportionate. The case was brought by a group of students represented by La Quadrature du Net and casts doubt on the legality of…
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An app used by more than 100 Bristol schools has raised concern among criminal justice and anti-racism campaigners that the easy access it gives safeguarding leads to pupils' and their families' contacts with police, child protection, and welfare services risks increasing discrimination against those of minority ethnic or working class backgrounds. Staff using the app say the app is often kept secret from parents and carers. The council website says the Think Family database, which the app…
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UK government ministers are seeking to ensure schools benefit financially from any future use of pupils’ data by large language models such as those behind ChatGPT and Google Bard. Data from the national pupil database is already available to third-party organisations. The BCS head of education recommends that the Department of Education should write a clear public benefits statement to ensure that initiatives benefit pupils as well as providing financial benefits.https://schoolsweek.co.uk/…
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The UK's Behavioural Insights ("Nudge") Unit has trialled machine learning models to help automate some decisions made by regulators such as Ofsted (schools), and the Care Quality Commission (health and social care in England). The resulting algorithm uses data such as the number of children are on free school meals, teachers' pay, the number of teachers for each subject, and parents' reviews of schools in order to predict which schools' performance might be suffering. The dataset deliberately…
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The UK’s education watchdog, Ofsted, is considering checking pupils’ and parents’ social media pages to ensure that schools maintain their standards. Privacy campaigners oppose the plan as overreach, while representatives of teachers’ unions warned the information would be unreliable. https://inews.co.uk/news/education/ofsted-snoop-parents-pupils-social-media-56319Publication: i NewsWriter: Richard Vaughan
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English school head teachers were asked to fill out a census form designed in partnership with the Department of Education and hosted by Capita that included fields asking for pupils’ asylum status, ethnicity, and passport numbers and export dates. Families are meant to be advised it’s not mandatory to supply the information, but when they don’t schools “ascribe” - that is, guess - children’s ethnicity. Privacy campaigners expressed concern that the census data would be used for immigration…
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ICO warns North Ayrshire Council for adopting facial recognition in schools without parental consent
The Office of the Information Commissioner has warned Scotland's North Ayrshire council that it has likely infringed data protection law by using facial recognition technology in nine schools. North Ayrshire used the iPayimpact contactless system for payment for meals, and claimed that 97% of parents had given consent. The ICO said that although consent was the appropriate legal basis, the requirements had not been met, and the council needed to explain how students' data will be collected,…
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The Focus1, or FuSi, from the US-based startup BrainCo, claims to measure how closely students are paying attention via electrodes that detect brain activity and send the data to teachers’ computers or a mobile app. Lights on the headband glow red, yellow, or blue to signify the level of engagement. A backlash against the headband has begun in China, where a local authorities ordered a school to suspend its use after it was profiled in the Wall Street Journal. Among other issues, it’s not clear…
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Data-driven wellbeing audits are becoming common in classrooms in Denmark, which has long invested heavily in digital teaching aids and interactive learning. In the last few decades, depression among Danish children has sextupled, and a quarter of ninth-graders report having attempted self-harm. Platforms such as Woof offer teachers regular feedback based on anonymous self-reports. Similar systems in the US extend to surveilling students' emails, chat, and searches.Experts are concerned that…
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The facial recognition system the Indian state of Telangana intends to adopt for taking attendance in schools will be AI-enhanced, eliminate the paper register via an Android app, serve 2.6 million students in 26,000 schools, and be extended to teachers after it has been successfully implemented for students. The system will capture a secured binary template based on 72 points on the face rather than photos of end users.Article: Telengana facial recognition system will include…
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Following pilots in Nirmal and Jayashankar Bhupalpally districts, the government of the Indian state of Telangana is planning on adopting facial recognition software to manage attendance in the schools. Officials have said the system should ensure every transaction is transparent and traceable and work in all environments with low-configuration mobiles and tablets. The existing biometric system has had technical issues.Article: Telangana adopts facial recognition for taking…
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Since launching its The Learning App in 2015, the Indian EdTech company Byju's had grown to serve more than 80 million users and 5.5 million paid subscribers by 2021; it provides learning programs for students aged four years old and up. However, former employees say that underpinning the company's growth is a hard-selling culture that takes advantage of underprivileged families who can't afford their products but in India's hyper-competitive environment take out loans they can't afford to…
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The Nigerian startup uLesson, which began by offering pre-recorded lessons on dongles, now delivers livestreamed interactive video classes to learners in a number of African countries as well as the US and UK. One of uLesson's investors is Tencent, which also backed at least three Chinese EdTech companies between 2018 and 2021 before China began requiring companies teaching compulsory primary and middle school subjects in China to register as "nonprofit institutions".Article: Chinese-backed…
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Under a five-year $20.7 million contract, the US state of Utah is allowing the AI company Banjo real time access to numerous sources of state-owned camera and location data, among other types and combine it with information collected from social media, satellites, and other apps in order to use its algorithms to detect "anomalies" and alert law enforcement to crimes as they take place. Banjo claims to be able to do this while stripping personal information from its "Live Time Intelligence"…
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The Greek defence startup Lambda Automata is putting up "Outpost" autonomous observation towers to enhance monitoring of the country's numerous islands in the Aegean Sea, important in territorial conflicts with Turkey. The towers use computer vision algorithms to turn CCTV cameras into situational awareness tools; they are solar-powered and can accommodate third-party sensors to expand their functions. https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/10/04/autonomous-greek-islands-threats-tec/…
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Cellebrite, which provides technology to unlock phones and access their data, asks its government agency customers to keep both its technology and the fact that they used it secret, a leaked company training video shows. Such a request violates the rights of the public to expect that authorities are transparent when asking judges to authorise searches. In the video, the company employee claims that disclosure could hinder law enforcement and help criminals.https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/19/…
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Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 between 2009 and 2014, set up a meeting between Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, John Manzoni, in 2019; a year later the US-based company was awarded a £27 million contract to process border and customs data without competitive tender. Palantir's strategy appears to be to offer £1 contracts to provide services to gain a footing, and then raise prices once established. It has also hired former public servants and NHS executives.…
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Republic Squiare, one of the cultural and social hubs of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, is under constant surveillance by equipment made by the Chinese company Huawei that recognises faces, identifies vehicle number plates, and judges whether activities are "suspicious". Despite controversy over the cameras, Belgrade plans to extend the network to 8,000 cameras as part of a "safe city" partnership with Huawei. Similar installations are taking place across the world, exporting China's values to…
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When the Los Angeles Police Department opted to monitor the messages posted in forums on Neighbors, a companion app to Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras, the system forwarded over 13,000 messages in just over two years. Research shows, however, that this type of surveillance does a poor job of deterring property crime. A study of Neighbors posts in LA also shows that posters typically live in whiter, more affluent districts, and about 30% of posts did not describe criminal activity, just behaviour…
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The UK Home Office has drawn up secret plans to draft a letter lobbying the Information Commissioner's Office to allow the privately held company Facewatch's matching service to spread into retail shops and supermarkets across Britain in order to curb shoplifting. The strategy was agreed in a meeting between Facewatch, policing minister Chris Philip, and senior Home Office officials. It is not known what contact, if any, between the Home Office and the ICO followed the meeting.https://www.…
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The UK's Home Office is expanding its contract with the Portuguese company Tekever, which has supplied live-streamed drone footage captured by a combination of radar, video, and infrafred imagery through a £1 billion contract since 2020; this contract is now being extended to monitor large stretches of the English Channel in new ways. The UK is just one of many countries that see drones as a "game-changer" in patrolling borders and trapping human smugglers. The global drone market is expected…
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The call centre company Teleperformance, which employs about 380,000 people in 34 countries providing customer service for dozens of major UK companies and government departments, has told some non-UK staff that AI-powered webcams will be installed in their homes to watch for infractions of company rules while they work. Workers will have to click to indicate they're taking a break if they leave their desks and provide a reason. They will also be warned that stopping keyboard and mouse activity…
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A new report from Worker Info Exchange finds that drivers working for Just Eat have had their accounts abruptly de-activated by automated systems for alleged overpayments as small as £1.35, which many are contesting. Just Eat says that the overpayments were triggered because drivers had incorrectly recorded themselves waiting for an order when their GPS coordinates did not show them at the restaurant. In several cases, the GPS data however showed that they remained within a couple of minutes’…
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A survey commissioned by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office finds that a fifth of UK adults believe they have been monitored by an employer. Timekeeping and access were most commonly tracked, followed by emails, files, calls, or messages. Seventy percent said they would find such monitoring intrusive. Studies say that excessive tracking is associated with higher staff turnover rates and can be counterproductive. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/02/uk-adults-monitored-by-…
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Four French trade unions representing drivers signed an agreement with ride-hailing platforms to provide drivers with a minimum income and provide greater transparency regarding suspending and terminating drivers. Platforms must now give drivers a chance to respond before deactivating their accounts and must provide compensation based on previous income if an account's suspension proves unjustified. https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/entreprises/vtc-nouvel-accord-entre-plateformes-et-syndicats…
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Despite being a subscription service that doesn't depend on advertising revenue, Slack (owned by Salesforce) collects a large amount of data on the people who use its system, including details provided voluntarily at sign-up, when and how people use the platform, and information about third-party services users connect to it - and never deletes any of it. Users newly added to a channel can read the entire range of historical messages and files. Messages users send are controlled by the…