By The Defender Staff
NYC Schools Track Bathroom Time With Digital Hall Passes
Leaving class for a quick bathroom break now comes with a timer for many students in New York City. A digital hall pass system called SmartPass is rolling out across public schools. It replaces the old paper pass with a digital one. Students sign out on a classroom iPad. Then the system tracks how long they are gone. On paper, it sounds efficient. In practice, it is stirring strong reactions.
SmartPass logs when a student leaves class and tracks how long they are out and where they go. Teachers can view that information in real time, which gives them a live snapshot of student movement during the school day. SmartPass says the system is designed to improve safety, reduce disruptions and give staff better visibility into student movement. The system keeps a running total of time spent outside the classroom. It can also limit how many students are allowed in the hallway at once. In some cases, it can flag or block overlapping passes between students.
Schools can also restrict when passes are allowed, depending on the schedule or specific rules set by staff. Supporters say this helps reduce disruptions and keeps students accountable. They also argue it improves safety during emergencies because staff can quickly see who is out of class. However, that is only one side of the story.
Privacy advocates are raising bigger concerns. Critics say tools like SmartPass go too far.
AI Just One More Way Big Tech Can Manipulate Kids
A whole generation of American children has grown up glued to screens and the damage has become apparent to almost everyone, including a couple of juries.
A jury in Los Angeles has found Meta and YouTube liable for harming kids who got hooked by addictive algorithms, while a second jury in New Mexico agreed that the social media purveyors at Meta knew they were undermining children’s mental health while keeping secret Meta’s awareness of the child sexual exploitation that was being enabled by their platforms.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his peers in Silicon Valley have tried to keep up the pretense that they are just enthusiastic whiz kids who are making lives better through their command of new technology, but that image is a facade. Now that these young geniuses have reached middle age, it is abundantly clear that they are no different from the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Like the builders of railroads and founders of oil companies, when faced with a choice between making huge profits and protecting human beings, they will always choose the money. And that does not bode well for what has come next: artificial intelligence.
The race to get obscenely rich by selling AI to the world is being run by billionaire techies who oppose any government oversight or any guardrails on the road to the future they are paving for all of us. It is probably unavoidable that the next generation of kids will be the targets and victims of this unrestrained greed and hubris. Children are already being lured into an exploitative sphere where cheery, robotic voices pretend to be their best friends, and access to a hyper intelligence housed in their phones and computers negates the need for study, for reading, for writing or for critical thinking.
Calls to Regulate Smart Glasses Are Officially Deafening
Members of the U.S. Senate aren’t the only ones who want to know what’s going on with Meta’s reported plans to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses. This week, more than 60 civil society organizations in the U.S. signed a letter addressing Meta, its partner EssilorLuxottica (the maker of Ray-Bans), as well as the White House, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice.
Their concerns over the potential plan to add facial recognition sound familiar, though it’s more strongly worded and specific than prior inquiries. Here’s an excerpt from the joint letter: Integrating facial recognition into Meta glasses is a dangerous and reckless plan that will harm both users and the entire public, regardless of whether they use Meta products, whether they consent, whether they are a public figure or layperson, and whether they even know about it.
This move will endanger us all, and particularly give ammunition to scammers, blackmailers, stalkers, child abusers, and authoritarian regimes. It would also create acute and unnecessary national security risks.
The Verdict Against Meta and Google Carries Sinister Implications
Diluting democracy’s foundational belief in individual agency opens the door to governmental overreach. The most sinister idea in modern politics has received a California jury’s endorsement, and much applause. It contradicts democracy’s foundational belief in individual agency.
This concept presupposes that individuals can, in common parlance, “make up their minds.” They can assemble and edit their beliefs and convictions. When this idea is diluted, government expands its ambition to curate the public’s consciousness.
As Congress did when banning Chinese-owned TikTok, ostensibly for “national security” reasons. For the first time, Congress targeted a specific speech forum because of conjectural harms that might result from what a congressional committee called “divisive narratives.”
They Did What They Were Told — Now Many Are Left Behind
A growing number of individuals say their lives changed — sometimes overnight — after COVID-19 vaccination. Once sidelined as anecdotal or politically inconvenient, these voices are now forcing their way into mainstream discourse. And it frankly happened years too late.
A recent feature by David Cox, a medical journalist with a background in neuroscience for the UK’s The Telegraph, brings these cases into sharp focus, portraying what he describes as a “dark legacy” of the pandemic response. From an economic perspective TrialSite has referred to them as the substantial externality of injury and costs to society, many of which are born on individual with little means.
The instinct from many corners of public health has been caution: don’t overinterpret, don’t amplify uncertainty. Perhaps at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic such an instinct could be understood. Now years later, a different question emerges: What happens to those who may have been harmed — however rarely — when the system moves on?
California Middle Schools Are Ground Zero for Testing AI in Classrooms
In Gregory Dharman’s eighth grade math class at South Lake Middle School in Irvine, the exit ticket his students turn in every month doesn’t go to the teacher — they go to Snorkl, an artificial intelligence software program capable of grading quizzes, exams and homework. How does Snorkl work? Students type in responses to questions or answer verbally, and receive instant feedback. If students don’t get an acceptable score, they can retake the quiz until they do.
What is happening at South Lake Middle is happening across California as middle schools become ground zero for introducing AI into curriculum and classrooms. Experts say that students in elementary school may be too young to interact with AI, and students going into high school should already know how to use it. A RAND survey revealed that 41% of middle schoolers in the U.S. said that they use AI for their schoolwork.
The post NYC Schools Track Bathroom Time With Digital Hall Passes + More appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.
IPAK-EDU is grateful to The Defender as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More
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