Students are Learning to Resist Surveillance

upstart writes:

Students Are Learning To Resist Surveillance: Year in Review 2021:

As schools have shuffled students from in-person education to at-home learning and testing, then back again, the lines between "school" and "home" have been blurred. This has made it increasingly difficult for students to protect their privacy and to freely express themselves, as online proctoring and other sinister forms of surveillance and disciplinary technology have spread. But students have fought back, and often won, and we're glad to have been on their side.

Early in the year, medical students at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine were blindsided by an unfounded dragnet cheating investigation conducted by the administration. The allegations were based on a flawed review of an entire year's worth of student log data from Canvas, the online learning platform that contains class lectures and other substantive information. After a technical examination, EFF determined that the logs easily could have been generated by the automated syncing of course material to devices logged into Canvas.

When EFF and FIRE reached out to Dartmouth and asked them to more carefully review the logs-which Canvas' own documentation explicitly states should not be used for high-stakes analysis-we were rebuffed. With the medical careers of seventeen students hanging in the balance, the students began organizing. At first, the on-campus protest, the letter to school administrators, and the complaints of unfair treatment from the student government didn't make much of an impact. In fact, the university administration dug in, instituting a new social media policy that seemed aimed at chilling anonymous speech that had appeared on Instagram, detailing concerns students had with how these cheating allegations were being handled.

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