Consider that schools are said to be spending a lot on mass surveillance kit and what that means for parents, students, and everyone else in the neighborhood.

Mass surveillance is the principal abuse here and the likely reliance on non-free (user-subjugating, proprietary) software (which is often malware) compounds the problems. One could go further in exploring additional abuses by looking into what is done with the data:

• Where is the data stored?
• Who else has access to the data?
• What do they do with the data?
• Is any of this knowable?

but indiscriminately collecting information on people in the hope it will somehow prove useful is mass surveillance, spying on everyone as if everyone is guilty by default. This is also a way to convince fearful people of the notion that it’s right and proper to have no privacy.

Consider this excerpt from the article:

“Schools are justified in thinking about safety, both in terms of gun violence and other possible hazards,” Rachel Levinson, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Gizmodo. “At the same time, these technologies do not exist in a vacuum; we know, for instance, that facial recognition is less accurate for women and people of color, and also that school discipline is imposed more harshly on children of color.”

Everything Levinson says here is vague and remarkably inarticulate, and I don’t blame Levinson. For all we know, Gizmodo simply didn’t ask further questions to clarify these claims in what should have been the basis of the entire article. Being concerned is insufficient. Precisely how is a bunch of data like this going to curb gun violence? What other hazards are you referring to, exactly? Why should we be concerned about the details of accuracy of the collected information while we’re questioning whether it was ethical and useful to collect this data in the first place? Which school situations where “discipline is imposed more harshly on children of color” will be resolved by watching surveillance footage or examining location data?

All the more reason why people should get their own computers, never use school-issued computers, and make sure that their own computers run only a free software OS, and install nothing but free software on top of that. Also everyone (not just parents and students) need to politically organize to let students use privacy respecting books and (only if strictly needed) computer education that can be used from any computer OS.