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
The Washington Post's report on Syracuse University lands mid-arc in a documented expansion of campus monitoring. Earlier in 2019, US schools were already adopting programs for monitoring students' social media activity with little regard for effectiveness or privacy, and reporting showed roughly 44 universities working with outside companies to data mine and rank prospective students. The Syracuse case extends that pattern from applicants' web activity to enrolled students' physical presence.
What makes the story notable is the mechanism: WiFi and short-range sensors detect students' phones in professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, turning routine attendance into continuous behavioral data that schools reportedly use to analyze habits and even assess mental health. The concern raised — that this desensitizes students to round-the-clock surveillance — frames every later development in the coverage.
First-order effects
Students at Syracuse and similar schools now have attendance recorded automatically whenever their phones connect on campus, with the same sensor data repurposed for behavioral and mental-health analysis they did not explicitly opt into.
Privacy objections move from hypothetical to immediate: the students being tracked are identifiable individuals whose location history sits with the university and its vendors.
Second-order effects
Vendors of campus tracking tools gain a proven attendance use case to sell upward, pushing universities that have not deployed sensors to weigh competitive parity against privacy backlash.
Once campuses normalize passive phone detection, the barrier drops for broader deployments — the later reporting on a California college combining homework trackers, e-proctoring, and license plate readers shows exactly that stack assembling.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, universities become full-lifecycle data operations: institutions already profile applicants before admission, then track enrolled students' movements, and the pandemic-era reports of schools making location-tracking apps a condition of enrollment show how quickly an optional tool becomes mandatory.
A generation educated under constant institutional monitoring may carry normalized expectations of surveillance into workplaces and civic life — the desensitization effect the Post flags is the mechanism by which today's controversy becomes tomorrow's default.
The trend: US higher education is assembling a continuous-surveillance stack around students — attendance sensors, social media monitoring, applicant data mining, and mandated location apps — with each new tool lowering resistance to the next.
Horrifying article. I'm stunned faculty are embracing this. “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/ ...
As a professor, I feel strongly that the added pressure of being monitored 24/7, and having to question whether any activity will be scrutinized, will *increase* the dropout rate. https://twitter.com/...
There's “no money” for stable jobs and tenure lines, but they can implement these sophisticated tech surveillance systems just fine. https://twitter.com/...
Two tales of the future of #education and #AI. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/... /via @Techmeme #Juxtaposition https://twitter.com/...
The students I talked to said: 1) The schools didn't say enough about how the tracking systems worked; they'd learned from social media or student papers like @dailytarheel / @theCT. 2) This kind of surveillance is imminent. 3) They're powerless to stop it https://www.washingtonp…
So are we preparing students for self-directed independent life, or are we preparing ourselves to become China? Also. Somebody's making money off this data. Who? https://twitter.com/...
If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
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/ ...
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/...
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/ ..…
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/...
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.washingtonpos…
“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/ ...
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/...
“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…
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/ ...
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.washingtonpo…
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…
“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/...
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.washingtonpos…
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://tw…
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/...
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/...
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/...
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? http…
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/...