Second Big Story - Write to the Board and the Superintendent

Story One for this post is this:

TikTok and Instagram danger for girls by other 

students using Meta RayBans. 

Not to mention filming teachers in class. Will this be part of the SEA contract?

Two items to state:

- This is a clear invasion of privacy of minors. To put up videos you take of unsuspecting students (or students who say "leave me alone" or students just in the background) is wrong, wrong, wrong.

These glasses cost anywhere from $250 to $600. Most teens don't have that kind of cash so you might assume their parents bought them for their child. If you are that parent, YOU, yes you, have a responsibility to train your child what NOT to do. Because seriously, if your kid invades someone's privacy, there's always a parent who will sue you. Or, your kid gets arrested. 

Washington State IS a two-person consent state.

- I urge you to do what I did after I read about this - I contacted Superintendent Ben Schuldiner and the Board. Here's what the current policy (partial) says:

This procedure supports implementation of Board Policy No. 2022, Electronic Resources/Use of the Internet; Board Policy No. 2023, Digital Citizenship & Media Literacy; and related District policies and procedures. These policies and procedures are intended to promote positive and effective digital citizenship among students and staff. 

Students do not have an absolute right to possess or use personal electronic devices at school. School staff may restrict the use of personal electronic devices on school grounds and during the school day absent an approved accommodation that addresses a specific and articulated student need (e.g. assistive technology). Students using personally owned devices may be asked to make the device available to the District in the event of an investigation involving inappropriate behavior (e.g. bullying, harassment, discrimination). 

Students are expected to use personal electronic devices at school in a responsible, ethical, and legal manner. Expectations for behavior online are no different from expectations for face‑to‑face interactions.

I support an outright ban on these glasses - including at sporting events - in Seattle Public Schools. 

Folks, the Board can have all the "expectations" they want but the idea of being a teen is to push boundaries even if you have been warned not to.

Nope, it's gotta be a ban so if a student does bring those glasses to school, they have to be stored away the entire day.

Shuldiner - boshuldiner@seattleschools.org

School Board - schoolboard@seattleschools.org - I note that the Board gets so many emails they are unable to read them all. Put in the subject line - BAN Meta Ray Bans in SPS. Or call the Board office and just leave a message - 206-252-0000



This via Futurism that opens the story with this (bold mine):

The video has the distinctive style of the invasive “rizzcam” and other “POV” videos in which self-styled “pickup artists” and other online creators use smart glasses to record themselves harassing women at malls and boardwalks or pestering employees at their place of work for content. But the people in this video aren’t adults. Everyone in the clip — the girl, the boy filming, and hallway passersby — is a teenage student.

A Futurism review found large numbers of videos recorded at middle and high schools using smart glasses — almost always Meta’s AI Glasses, designed in partnership with the eyewear titan Ray-Ban — and shared to social media platforms TikTok and Instagram. Recordings take place in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, and feature interactions with other students as well as with staff and faculty.

Much of the behavior on display is plainly harassment and bullying, often filmed without the subjects’ knowledge or consent and uploaded online to humiliate them further. Strikingly, every single one of the many smart glasses videos we found were captured by teen boys — and their bad behavior was overwhelmingly directed at girls.

Many of the posts shared by students are vlog-style “Come With Me” or “Day in My Life” videos. Kids film themselves arriving at school, walking around with their friends, and sitting in the cafeteria or in class.

In other videos, students record themselves interacting with staff like teachers, aides, and security personnel. Though some of these adults realize they’re being filmed, most don’t appear to have a clue. Many of these encounters are relatively benign: one student recorded himself telling a teacher a ChatGPT-generated joke, for example, and another shows banter with a security guard.

But kids are also using Meta glasses to record and post videos of themselves or other students arguing with their teachers. “Teacher gets mad!!!” reads the caption of one video in which a teen filmed another student in an argument with a teacher about grades. In another clip, a student records himself quarreling with a teacher asking him to take out his notes.

I'm guessing the boy described below doesn't have much of a real life if he has time to do all this:

One prolific teenage boy who has more than 64,000 combined TikTok and Instagram followers has made dozens of videos that range from havoc-causing pranks — grabbing phones and running away, goofing around on a basketball court — to clear bullying and harassment of peers, particularly of teen girls.

In several videos, the poster follows young women around as they plead with him to go away. He sometimes films himself “ragebaiting” young women by making fun of their appearance, laughing as the teen girls grow more and more upset. All of these recordings become fodder for social media, opening up the people in his recordings, including his fellow students, to online laughter and further bullying.

Is it legal?

Schools aren’t exactly public spaces. (Public schools may be considered public property, but aren’t public areas in the sense that anyone can waltz in.) Several states also have two-party consent laws mandating that all parties involved in an interaction have to consent to it being recorded. Add in the fact that the people involved in these recordings tend to be minors, and there are a lot of fraught legal lines that kids are running up against when using inconspicuous wearables to film their peers.

Andy Liddell, a principal at the Austin, Texas-based EdTech Law Center, told Futurism that using smart glasses to film at school is “a terrible idea.”

“Traditionally the classroom has been a private place that not everybody in the world has access to, and so you do have an expectation of privacy in the classroom that’s greater than you have on the street,” said Liddell. “In states with one-party consent recording laws, this could potentially be in violation of those laws, and those can carry very steep penalties, including felony charges. So that’s a problem.”

Remember how teachers are trying to build trust in their classrooms so that kids feel comfortable and relaxed in their learning environment? This behavior does not help.

Here's what is suspicious to me:

The bigger issue here is that many of the clips weren’t automatically caught by the platforms. Futurism found videos on both TikTok and Instagram that violated their respective rules, but they remained online until the publication flagged the content directly.

And what does Meta say?

“Schools know their students best, and we respect their authority to set the rules for their learning environments, while also considering the needs of students with disabilities who may benefit from technology to participate,” the statement read. “Every pair of our glasses has a built-in capture LED light to let people know when a photo or video is taken, something smartphones and other cameras don’t have. It can’t be turned off, and if someone covers or damages the LED, the camera is disabled.

Mark Zuckerberg, each and every day, shows how low he will go for a buck. That light on the glasses? Easily missed or easily covered up (despite what it says above).

He has three daughters and I wonder how he would feel if this happens to them when they get older. 

Other concerns

The College Board, which runs the SAT test, banned students from wearing smart glasses while taking the exam starting in March. Phones and smart watches were already prohibited.

Student privacy in restrooms (which is the one place in school ANYONE should feel safe in) or looking up clothing is also a potential concern.

What are other districts doing?

Polk SD in Florida

Via the Palo Alto Daily Post:

The Sequoia Union High School District has already addressed smart glasses, with a policy that limits the use of a variety of devices starting in the fall.

The board approved a ban in June on “mobile communication devices” — including smart phones, flip phones, tablets, smart watches and smart glasses — during instructional time. Students must turn off the devices and store them in a designated area until class is over.

The policy is intended to “help our students thrive without the constant distraction of social media and text messages,” the district said on its website.

My second story is about what the folks who run TikTok did...as an experiment, this via the LA Times:

TikTok’s ‘depraved’ safety experiment on teens ignites Senate backlash

The existence of the experiment, discussed in detail in a confidential 2023 company document, was reported by Bloomberg Businessweek this month. It prompted the letter sent Wednesday by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to TikTok Inc. Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew and Adam Presser, CEO of the company’s Culver City-based U.S. spinoff.

Let me just pause here for some insight from my decade plus time writing about public education. I have found NOTHING that unites the GOP and Dems more than safety of children on social media and internet sites. Those two senators - Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal? She is a MAGA senator and he is very liberal senator and yet here they both are.

Keep this in mind in case you think all you can do is throw up your hands. Your senators will listen on this issue.

“We write regarding disgusting new reports that TikTok knowingly withheld a critical safety measure for millions of American users — including children — in order to determine whether protecting users would impact its financial bottom-line,” the four-page letter began. The Businessweek story’s “appalling” revelations, the senators wrote, “raise serious questions about TikTok’s repeated assurances to Congress, parents and the American public that it prioritizes the safety and well-being of young people over profit.”

The TikTok document, handed over in litigation against the world’s biggest social media companies and placed under a court-ordered seal, shows the company intentionally switched off an algorithmic safeguard from 10% of U.S. users, turning them into a control group. The safeguard was designed to break up online echo chambers of harmful content.

At the time, that control group would have been approximately 15 million people. One was 16-year-old Chase Nasca, of Bayport, N.Y. His account, the document said, was fed thousands of videos about sadness, hopelessness, loneliness and suicide right up until he killed himself. Chase was randomly selected for the algorithm experiment on Jan. 25, 2022. Within a month, he was dead.

“The fact that they did this knowingly and that they used their users as an experiment is something that just seems inconceivable,” Blackburn said in an interview after the Businessweek story was published but before the letter was sent. “It shows you how when our children are on these social media platforms — they are the products.” 

 

What did TikTok say?

The company turned off the safety setting for some: “The user impact decision was a delicate balance across safety and the ability to measure impact on DAU (daily active users) and core metrics.”

In their letter, Blumenthal and Blackburn pointed out that Congress had raised concerns about TikTok’s algorithm driving young users toward harmful content since October 2021 — before the company rolled out the experiment. The revelations, the senators wrote, “are made even more sinister because TikTok was on notice about the effects of its recommendation algorithms on children.”

Enough!