Many schools in the US, including Syracuse U., track students' phones to monitor class attendance, as some worry it desensitizes students to 24/7 surveillance
When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class … Tweets: @drewharwell , @adamd_hill , @privacyattorney , @g_solaria , @jreidenberg , @mutual_ayyde , @galenbacharier , @jason_kint , @alfonslopeztena , @drunicornphd , @shibleytelhami , @martinkaste , @senblumenthal , @profcarroll , @ghoulnoise , @thejenlife , @bubbaprog , @tdietterich , @profmarlowe , @hshaban , @codebytere , @sorayamcdonald , @digiphile , and @lollardfish Tweets: Drew Harwell / @drewharwell : New: Colleges are tracking students' location to enforce attendance, analyze their behavior and assess their mental health. One company calculates a student's “risk score” based on factors such as whether she is going to the library enough https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Adam Hill / @adamd_hill : “They want those points,” he said. “They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.” This really isn't the kind of behavioral change in their students professors should strive for. What a disaster. https://twitter.com/... Shaq Kalaka / @privacyattorney : “One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @g_solaria : This is not ok. I would never attend a college that thinks they can track me like this, and if I had college aged kids I'd discourage them strongly from even applying. https://twitter.com/... Joel Reidenberg / @jreidenberg : It's no wonder US higher ed is in real trouble when: “The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Nice / @mutual_ayyde : boy did reading this vindicate the notion that liberalism is stuck at a local optima because it can't allow for new possibilities that would destroy the equilibrium that sustains it https://twitter.com/... Galen Bacharier / @galenbacharier : “Students today have so many distractions,” said Tami Chievous, an associate athletic director at the University of Missouri, where advisers text some freshmen athletes if they don't show up within five minutes of class. “We have to make sure they're doing the right thing.” https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : 1) this is absurd abuse of expectations, 2) and any students should protest this if their U., is doing it, 3) then demand why there isn't a national law to regulate it. https://twitter.com/... Alfons Lpez Tena / @alfonslopeztena : Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands — Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across US to track students more precisely than ever before https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Dr. Uniclaus / @drunicornphd : fuck off, i'm an adult. i was an adult the entirety of college and i paid money to be there. https://twitter.com/... Shibley Telhami / @shibleytelhami : ‘new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’ privacy on a massive scale.' https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Martin Kaste / @martinkaste : Ten years ago, colleges tracking students like this would be a huge scandal. Now people shrug. Don't let anybody tell you we're not reprogramming ourselves to accept surveillance. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Richard Blumenthal / @senblumenthal : Flunking basic Privacy 101, institutions of “higher learning” are careening off a 1984 cliff. Big Brother tracking seamlessly becomes listening, recording, watching, sharing, & selling data. Teachers are next on this slippery slope to sacrifice privacy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... David Carroll / @profcarroll : In Xinjiang, Chinese police at checkpoints force Uighers to install an app to track their behavior patterns for social control. In American Universities, administrators force students to install an app to track their behavior patterns for social control. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @ghoulnoise : wow I only just found out that my college started student tracking two years before I graduated, I do not remember anyone talking about it and only found a vague explanation of it on the website from that year can't even tell if they used phone data or student ID scans https://twitter.com/... Jen / @thejenlife : Ew. College is there to figure out the trade off between going to class vs. sleeping in to a certain extent. https://twitter.com/... Timothy Burke / @bubbaprog : More terrific work from Drew, but also: I taught college for ten years. There is zero reason to enforce or track attendance in lecture classes. A student's absence has zero impact on the learning opportunities of their classmates in a lecture class. https://twitter.com/... Thomas G. Dietterich / @tdietterich : Campus surveillance: I'm amazed administrators think this is a good idea. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Melanie Marlowe / @profmarlowe : This makes my hands cold. Constant digital monitoring on college campuses on massive scale. Apparently there is almost nothing modern univs won't do to “ease” the experience for students. (And I'm certain the surveillance doesn't just stop with the kids.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Hamza Shaban / @hshaban : Disturbing example of using surveillance technology to “solve” problems that either don't exist or would be better addressed with counselors/student outreach/asking people how they are doing https://twitter.com/... Jingle Shells / @codebytere : holy...shit? this is deeply immoral and damaging to students in a host of ways, but on an engineering level: how do you rationalize building this, when there's not even a layer of indirection between the product and its clearly delineated intended uses? https://twitter.com/... Soraya Nadia McDonald / @sorayamcdonald : This is madness. Absolute Orwellian dystopian madness https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Alex Howard / @digiphile : Co-sign Jack. Key trend: Colleges are tracking students more precisely than ever before: “Dozens of schools now use...technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health"-@drewharwell How many gave informed consent, @FTC? https://twitter.com/... David M. Perry / @lollardfish : Our choices are trust or panopticon. There is no third choice. I wrote about this for @TheAtlantic in 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands mid-arc: earlier in 2019, US schools were already adopting social media monitoring programs with little regard for privacy or effectiveness, and Washington Post reporting showed roughly 44 universities working with outside firms to data mine and rank prospective students. The Syracuse case extends that pipeline from applicants' web activity to enrolled students' physical presence — WiFi and short-range sensors now log who shows up to class.
What makes the attendance use case consequential is how ordinary it sounds: a professor automating roll call. But the same infrastructure, per the related coverage, also feeds behavior analysis and mental-health assessment, and within months the pandemic pushed many universities to make location-tracking apps a condition of enrollment — turning an opt-in convenience into a gate.
First-order effects
- Students at Syracuse and peer institutions have their phone locations logged whenever they enter sensor-equipped classrooms, with attendance enforcement as the stated purpose and behavior/mental-health analysis riding on the same data.
- Privacy advocates and some faculty now face a concrete artifact to contest — not hypothetical surveillance, but a live system tied to grades.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling WiFi sensing and analytics gain a repeatable education market: once attendance justifies the sensors, campuses can layer on the homework trackers, e-proctoring, and license plate readers later documented at a California college (The Markup's 2023 reporting).
- Universities without such systems face competitive pressure on retention and 'engagement' metrics, pushing adoption decisions toward procurement rather than pedagogy or consent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, a generation of students is conditioned to accept location tracking as a default term of institutional membership — a normalization effect the article's own sources flag as desensitization to 24/7 surveillance.
- Structurally, higher education drifts toward treating enrolled students as continuously instrumented populations, which eventually forces the question regulators and courts have so far handled piecemeal: whether FERPA-era consent frameworks cover ambient sensor networks at all.
The trend: US colleges are normalizing location surveillance one benign use case at a time — attendance first, then enrollment conditions, then campus-wide instrumentation.