Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the U.S. don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts.
“As we demonstrated with our own Red Flag Machine, however, this software flags and blocks websites for spurious reasons and often disproportionately targets disadvantaged, minority and LGBTQ youth,” the Electronic Software Foundation (EFF) says.
The companies making the software claim it’s all done for the sake of student safety: preventing self-harm, suicide, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. While a noble goal, given that suicide is the second highest cause of death among American youth 10-14 years old, no comprehensive or independent studies have shown an increase in student safety linked to the usage of this software. Quite to the contrary: a recent comprehensive RAND research study shows that such AI monitoring software may cause more harm than good.
Speaking as an infosec professional, security monitoring software should be targeted at threats, not at the user. We want to know the state of the laptop as it relates to the safety of the data on that machine. We don’t, and in healthy workplaces can’t, determine what an employee is doing that does not behaviorally conform to a threat.
Yes, if a user repeatedly gets virus detections around 9pm, we can infer what’s going on, but we aren’t tracking their websites visited, because the AUP is structured around impacts/outcomes, not actions alone.
As an example, we don’t care if you run a python exploit, we care if you run it against a machine you do not have authorization to (i.e. violating CFAA). So we don’t scan your files against exploitdb, we watch for unusual network traffic that conforms to known exploits, and capture that request information.
So if you try to pentest pornhub, we’ll know. But if you just visit it in Firefox, we won’t.
We’re not prison guards, like these schools apparently think they are, we’re town guards.