Some of the LinkedIn Responses are direct and on-point, and also hilariously/depressingly based depending on how you look at it:
EDIT: In hindsight, I think I should’ve looked into posting this in a different community… It’s closer to a silly “innovation”… soo… is this considered FUD? I also don’t support smoking or vaping, especially among kids. Original title had “privacy-violating” before the “solution”.
I’ll chime in with a weird take: this is a privacy community, we are united in a sense of defending our peaceful and unproblematic browsing on the internet and sending messages to friends from lunatics who seem to want everyone treated with the suspicion of highest criminal activity. the article posted describes a “privacy infringement” onto someone who not only has already broken the rule, but strongly publicized it by making people have to smell it. the perpetrators didn’t even have an expectation of privacy, so the premise is ridiculous.
I’ll say it like this: if the tv detects nicotine patches on someone’s skin, then i pick up the torches and pitchforks.
This. It’s a sensor, detecting only a specific air type. Not a camera, not a microphone. It doesn’t have to do with privacy, this is not “scan and collect data about all to punish one” and cannot be turned into one.
I’ll agree it’s a fuc**ing dumb idea. Like utter useless garbage. Classic capitalistic “fix behavioral trash-consumption issue with overpriced fancy tech products that sound amazing in theory and are garbage in practice, without fighting the problem at the root”. Screenshot comment said tax moeny but I’m willing to bet this is some kind of private school.
This may be a controversial take, but maybe we shouldn’t surveil children in bathrooms full stop.
There’s no indication they use cameras in there. It’s most likely just a sensor for vape smoke, similar to your common fire alarm.
And if it makes bathrooms a place where everyone can breathe without inhaling nicotine, I’m all for it. This is not a serious privacy concern.
Anything that picks anything up in a bathroom is a privacy concern.
In usual schools teachers are required to walk through every bathroom once in every break because the children are hiding in there to skip going in the yard. I do think this is much more annoying though.
It’s not surveilling children, it’s surveilling the byproducts of vaping.
I think your take is too far. It’s just beyond reasonable.
If a teacher were outside the room and heard a loud crash, they’d go investigate. This is doing the same thing.
It isn’t identifying individuals, it doesn’t record any information about a person, it simply flags that somebody is breaking the rules and is worth taking a look.
This is about the least invasive technological solution you could get.
And it’s a heck of a lot better than alternatives like removing the stall doors.
Imagine paying taxes for education and they spend it on shit like this.
I strongly suspect stuff like this happens at rich people’s private schools.
Ain’t no public school in the US got money for this.
One upside from not having enough budget, ghouls don’t have enough money to develop stuff like this in public schools.
Nah. Poor public schools spend waaaay to much money on shit like this. Source: Have worked as a teacher in a poor public school.
My old HS recently implemented an app to go to the bathroom. If you dont check out in the app you are written up. Source: my younger brother
If you dont check out in the app you are written up.
And what’s next?
I would assume ISS, then regular suspension, then expulsion
ISS, as in: you get shot into space?
We have to get those astronauts boeing stranded up there back somehow…
boeing
No-no-no. They have worse quality control than even roscosmos, which is huge anti-achivement. I’d rather trust Rogozin personally, than boeing managers. At least we know on which dacha he stores stolen money.
Right, America. They even make people pay to become productive members of society.
pay to become products* FTFY
Rich kids at private schools aren’t wasting time vaping. They have cocaine they bought off someone on the faculty or brought in from mommy and daddy’s stash at home.
Schools are more like prisons nowadays
Start them early
Reeeeeeee! Fucking badges and metal detectors.
This is reminiscent of the dystopian “name and shame” displays China has for jaywalkers. Good job, tech bro! Another innovation in our developing surveillance state.
Wait till this crowd hears about smoke detectors.
Kids will vape at the sensors just to see them on the TV
new challenge, get your name on every bathroom vape moniter in 1 day
The dildo of an unintended consequences is approaching.
Bullies will start blowing vape smoke on other kid’s desks to get them in trouble. And someone will eventual create a smoke-box class room to get the screen to light up with alerts.
Then what? You need to cross reference the alerts with a video feed or snapshots.
Then some genius will figure that using AI to analyze all of the data is easier than manually doing so.
The device still needs a human to investigate. Also it can’t narrow it down to specific students. All it can say is that there was vaping related chemicals detected in the bathroom.
All it can say is that there was vaping related chemicals detected in the bathroom.
Bring in a fog machine (mostly same ingredients) and see if machines can have aneurisms.
A fog machine doesn’t have any of the same metals or nicotine.
Also why would it be ok for a student to bring in a fog machine. That also seems kinda problematic
You don’t vape metals unless you’re running it unreasonably long and hot without juice. The studies that showed metals shedding from coils basically engineered it through nonrealistic methods that would never be repeated in the wild, you’d notice the worst taste you’ve ever had as the cotton singes long before the coil sheds any material. That said, vape juice is VG, PG, Flavors, and Nic; fog machine juice is VG, PG, distilled water, and essential oils if you want some smells. The bulk of both fluids is literally the exact same with the exception that vapes require USP food grade VG/PG where nobody cares with fog machines.
As to your second question: Because it’s funny. Of course they’d be mad about it, that’s part of why it’s funny. Not a class clown, were you?
Any good school should have a fog machine of its own IMO.
the sensors aren’t placed on desks, you can see that the displays are placed outside of bathrooms because that’s where kids generally vape. my high school has sensors inside the bathrooms on the ceiling and they don’t work. you’re thinking of a scenario that’s incredibly difficult and costly to implement, I assure you no district would be willing to hook this bullshit up to EVERY DESK. the term “Simon’s desk” here is likely just a name for one of the sensors they used to test this concept, with the sensor being located at the desk of a developer named simon
@uberstar narc alarm
perc alert!!!
Unless there will be disciplinary follow-up ( -> no reason for this design), I only see this going the way of de-facto scoreboards among kids.
They can just send in security to investigate. Maybe not every time the alarm is tripped but if they start seeing often they can start making connections. They can basically plan a bust once in a while.
Considering it only detects if someone in the bathroom is vaping and not who, disciplinary action just isn’t really possible with your typical school restroom.
They can send people to investigate. Also you could just have someone outside. It should be fairly obvious.
It doesn’t replace humans but it can compliment them. I’m not sure why people see this as a privacy issue. We aren’t talking about some scary mass surveillance system here
This is taking the route of individual monitoring and public shaming to prevent vaping. That doesn’t work, especially with teens.
It isn’t individual monitoring. It is an alarm in the bathroom. It can also detect smoke from a fire.
And if there’s one kid in the bathroom or a person posted by the bathroom watching the monitor? This feels very police state, monitor and enforce not educate and encourage.
The main picture says “Vape Sensor in Simon’s Desk”, so it sounds like each pupil’s desk is going to have a sensor.
That’s what I thought at first, but the person who wrote the article is named Simon, and based on the context given in the article I’m assuming that was a test unit he had on his desk, but the planned implementation is in bathrooms.
In my high school they managed to rip the alarm’s siren off the wall without triggering it; if these kids have even an 1/8 th of the ingenuity they had, these things aren’t gonna last
Plastic bag and a rubber band, my good sir!
I’m intrigued. How does that work?
It has to have the vape fumes get to the sensor. Cover the sensor with the bag, tie off with rubber band. No more ability to sense what can’t get there.
I, in no way, am endorsing vaping, especially with kids.
That seems like a management issue.
They can see the time it went offline and then the time you walked out of the bathroom. It doesn’t take much to put it together.
Also I think these devices are designed to be resistant to tampering.
A piece of clear packing tape would take it out permanently as it would be almost impossible to see that the sensor was covered if the tape was applied cleanly.
You’ve seen packing tape in real life, right? It’s not “almost impossible to see”, it’s shiny and obvious. As much as I love skirting draconian measures, that ain’t it…
Nobody is going to inspect it that closely, especially if they mount it on the ceiling. It does blend into certain plastics that are smooth.
Do kids prefer to not have doors then? Because I’m reading a lot of messed up headlines where the school removes the stall and bathroom doors and kids lose their privacy.
I’d rather have the TV with an alert than have to do competitive pooping.
That just sounds like a seperate problem to me.
It’s a separate but adjacent problem.
No school should ever be allowed to take the doors off bathroom stalls.
That just seems to be the alternative that don’t places are doing to deal with kids congregating in the bathroom to vape.
Its amazing the number of problems in life that csn be solved with a $2 harbor freight automatic punch. Speakers especially.
A very long time ago, and much less technologically advanced:
I went to boarding school. We had a little bit of a propensity for sneaking out of the dorm at night.
New dean comes in our senior year and installs alarms on all the exits.
Our senior year time capsule contains the controlling keypad to that alarm system that wasn’t even functional for twenty four hours.
I’ve no doubt that today’s teens possess the ingenuity to bypass if not completely disable this thing.
Of all problems US schools are dealing with, surely vaping is the one that requires the most urgent action.
It is very bad for young brains
Not as bad as being shot.
Maybe they can modify it to display a gunshot scoreboard.
A school district spends $180,000 (hyperbole, I don’t know actual numbers) of taxpayer money deploying this system between the actual hardware costs, maintenance costs to install the hardware, it costs to implement it into their network, and probably an ongoing contact with this dummy’s company. Maybe only for support but with the way things are now I’m sure they built this app to phone home to their servers (introducing a huge potential security risk over simply running it locally on the schools existing network infrastructure in a docker or something), calling it “cloud based”, and charging the district 1k/month to run the devices the district now owns and should be able to operate without the company. The company then talks about how they’ll back up records and safeguard data so you don’t have to worry about that (that it dept you pay is pointless!)
Three months after deployment it turns out the sensors can be tripped by many things not related to vaping, maybe increases in heat, mouthwash breath, etc. the false positives are due to a hardware flaw and cannot be fixed with a patch. Feel free to upgrade to sensor version 2.0, now with improved accuracy! (read: the problem still exists but isn’t as bad). Only another 40k to buy the new hardware, rip out the old hardware (which is now worthless), install the new stuff, and configure the software for everything (again, maintenance and IT costs)
9 months after deployment the company is doing poorly because their product is stupid and only a few idiots actually bought it (way to go idiot). There’s concerns because they sent a new Eula that outlines data sharing policies. They are potentially finding ways to harvest the data they agreed to safely store to try and create a new revenue stream to right their sinking ship. District counsel says fighting the Eula change will be expensive and there’s not much precedent for it, plus they state they will anonymize data before sharing so it’s not a ferpa violation, technically. It feels scummy but you can’t do anything about it. You also don’t really trust them to only sell anonymized data but you can’t prove they aren’t crossing that line so whatever, I guess
15 months after deployment they get hacked because they’ve run out of vc cash, never could get an actual profit stream going (turns out they’re spending 750,000/yr on salaries for 5 people and they’re all kitted out with sick work computers for what is basically coding a web app, but I digress). security of their servers was one of the budgetary constraints they chose to make to right the ship (but had to keep the $1800 office chairs and the 15-20k/mo rent loft they use as an office in a hcol area). The contract says this may happen and they’re not responsible unless there’s gross negligence on their part, which you can’t prove, and that they do some bare minimum reactionary shit after the fact to mitigate damage. So they’re legally blameless and now you get to notify your community their children’s data was leaked to god knows who, whoops
22 months after the fact they go out of business officially. You get a form email about the company’s journey and the difficult decision they had to make to stop fucking around on a dumb project that sucks because no dumbass vc will give them fun bucks anymore to keep playing tech bro billionaire. All the sensors stop working because they require a connection to the servers, which they shut off immediately without a sunset period. You’re reminded every day when you log in to the schools admin panel and get 350 “sensor not connected” error messages and your students bitch about the “sensor not connected: server not available” error pop up showing up on their classroom console. It takes IT a few days to remove their shit from the network and that costs you even more money in wasting your IT staff time when they should be fixing the broken computers in the computer lab or whatever.
Now your school has a bunch of weird boxes on the wall. Sometimes people ask you about them and you go “oh those don’t do anything” and remember that they cost taxpayers in your community tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars and wasted hundreds of hours of your supports staffs time that they could’ve been using to improve the school
But then you scroll on instagram and see there’s this new thing that will detect when kids are bullying each other. You just have to put a camera in each classroom. It’s okay, it won’t record. It will just use the power of AI and machine learning. You’re sold right there and the cycle starts again
Finally, a local WEEE company gets to make a few hundred bucks selling off the glorified VOC sensors at the end.
Best comment I’ve read for a long time
This sounds about right. My only quibble is about sick computers and web apps. Twenty years ago I felt good because all I needed was a text editor and a web browser. Nowadays, the hungriest apps on my desktop are Firefox and VS Code.
To be fair, 20 years ago your computer would have choked doing 1/10th the stuff either one of those apps do today. Hell, I still remember writing a prank program that would lock up my school computers because I made it beep too fast.
Wow you unlocked a memory in me. I recall doing something similar but using some send command to do the same with any computer logged in and on the network.
Week after that I met a dude from municipal school IT support and that’s when I first learned about Linux. He had Red Hat on his laptop and he was happy to talk about it. Very cool dude.
a docker
Something tells me you don’t really know Docker
I mean like running their hypothetical control software/framework within a docker on a local server. Is that illogical? I do the same for the software that runs my ip cameras with my home server, instead of them needing to connect to some external server.
You’re ultimately right though, when it comes to docker I am at the proficiency level of “can deploy other people’s images” and not so much on the “have bothered to make my own”
My work had something like this to detect drug usage on premises for a while (it was and is a problem still) and it costed like 30k capital and 2-3 opex a year. We had it for like a year and only took it out because there were too many false flags and security didn’t and doesn’t have the staff to be chasing down every alert anyway.
It was neat that on paper it was able to detect different drugs, heroin, weed, meth all flagged different alerts with 2 of those contacting police when detected. Unfortunately it was only like 70% accurate and we didn’t/don’t have enough security staff to use it properly so it’s gone now.
Its easy enough to make a tube to blow through that should remove enough particulates to bypass the sensor. The kids would never figure this out though. /s
I wish they would. It might mean fewer fire alarms tripped by vapes. (I work in a college library and it’s not funny have to evacuate the building just because someone decided to vape in a study room.)
Idk how much the school landscape has changed since I was last in school, but back when I was in school people would break their school assigned chromebooks just for shits and giggles. I can’t imagine that tv will last for long.
then they’ll put a cop next to each one of them and the cop will shoot the kids who come near it. that’ll fix it.
Didn’t even think of that. Went to a small town school so we didn’t have cops or security.
i’m going by hearsay here, i dont know what school is like in the US. i know what a single school was like in about 1998, but that doesnt tell me much about the rest of the country.
but from what i hear, the US has security gates and cops in schools, and the cops regularly brutalize and arrest the kids for random bullshit.
Oh, don’t worry, that’s only in urban schools.
(hint: urban is a dogwhistle for Black)
That’s why here, giving a student a laptop without supervision is unthinkable… Good if the school has computers at all anyway.
