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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then how is the social pressure thing meant to work?
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.
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.
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If you dont check out in the app you are written up.
And what’s next?
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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.
Nah. Poor public schools spend waaaay to much money on shit like this. Source: Have worked as a teacher in a poor public school.
One upside from not having enough budget, ghouls don’t have enough money to develop stuff like this in public schools.
One would hope, but no, so long as the Super-Intendent gets his kick-backs, this is the shit that takes priority over all-else.
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.
At least there are some criticisms. Considering it’s LinkedIn, forever, it will get drowned by a sea of synergy pivoting lunatics.
Rare LinkedIn ✨positive vibes✨ theater going off-script
Bubble gum stuck into the sensor coming in 5 seconds…
Good God I hate linkedin types. Imagine thinking writing an app that literally just displays a single notification is worthy of making a whole post about. They basically wrote a Hello World app for Android TV. And I’m sure they got paid like 40k by some poor school district to do so.
I physically cannot read LinkedIn for more than 5 minutes at a time. I get seriously nauseated 🤢🤢🤢 from all the corporate talk
Deleting your Microsoft LinkedIn account is an option
It’s how recruiters find me, so unfortunately I can’t. I almost never open it, though.
… Do you think reading a sensor and then accurately determining when the sensor data meets a threshold is the same as displaying static text? Kind of an exaggeration
That’s not what the post is about, it’s entirely about the android TV app. I assume they already built the functionally to generate the alarm signal (since it’s the entire raison d’etre for the company based on the name).
Right a lot of assumptions are being made here. The only thing I assume is this company built some app
I mean, I’m assuming that because that’s what he’s saying in the text.
In all likelihood calling manufacturer’s API to read the value then compare to a compile-time constant? It’s a notification hello-world merged with display-a-list hello world and manufacturer’s reading-sensor-values hello world. Yes I do think it’s borderline trivial
Congratulations you’re clearly an amazing developer if you have to talk about this so weirdly
I do not claim to be amazing, and it’s a simple fact that many basic examples/tutorials are named with hello world (and pretty easy to search for that way). A quick Google pulls up e.g. “Hello World!” of push notifications, Problems with simple “hello world” of ListView in Android
And of course I’m also explicitly using Hello World to reference the original comment
Satellite Hello World + Telescope Hello World ⇒ Hubble Space Telescope Hello World
Yeah what I think is weird is that you make a bunch of assumptions about how the app is built. Experienced developers imo know that things are unexpectedly difficult all the time. Even when they are supposed to be as simple as you’re assuming here.
Absolutely I am making a bunch of assumptions. Following the tried and true Keep It Simple Stupid approach. Because there is no indication given that any more complexity is required, and keeping complexity to a minimum is key to efficient development. If there was anything actually technically impressive (or at least technically impressive sounding) about what they did, I trust they would have mentioned it.
I’m pretty sure this guy was just a project manager or similar. So yeah I am not surprised they’re not mentioning technical hurdles.
Ok but this is very simple. Everyone can set up something like this using home assistant and a few sensors connected up to it
Everyone can write software? I’m fucked then… Guess I’ll be homeless now
Vape “detectors” are the latest off-the-shelf scam product sold to well-meaning but technically clueless school administrators. They don’t work at all but they have a solid sales pitch. This tv app isn’t doing anything but forwarding a notification provided by the manufacturer of the “detection “ device.
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
Its amazing the number of problems in life that csn be solved with a $2 harbor freight automatic punch. Speakers especially.
Plastic bag and a rubber band, my good sir!
I’m intrigued. How does that work?
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.
Introducing!
The Narc App!
Sure to be a hit. Hit with the closest blunt object.
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 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
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
How is this invading someone’s privacy? All it’s doing is detecting if children are smoking in a room or space at school and then putting an alert up about the detection on a screen.
They have zero right to privately smoke at school, or anywhere for that matter, smoking is illegal for children and not something to be taken lightly.
Similarly, adults have no right to privately smoke whilst in the workplace in the bathroom or other non-smoking designated areas. This is also illegal and not to be taken lightly.
I agree. These are anonymous messages. I don’t see any privacy violations.
They could set up camera’s that record who’s entering and leaving the restroom and thus violate privacy but this seems fair play to me. They’ll just vape somewhere else.
They’re not anonymous tho, the image very clearly labels who’s desk the vaping was detected at
It says “Simon’s desk” which is the name of the guy making the post, which to me says he was testing the software from his desk.
When it is deployed, it would say “vaping detected in north stairwell” or whatever. They are not installing sensors on every desk.
Simon’s desk probably refers to a location, not actually the desk of Simon.
Yeah, we have similar sensors at my job. I work in a highly secured facility and smoke/vape detectors are installed in all the bathrooms. It makes the fire alarm go off if detected.
How is this invading someone’s privacy?
So you think they will not use this to try to identify the vaping student?
They ought to use it that way if they aren’t. Privacy does not mean “flagrant ability to flout rules or laws”
So you think we should all be allowed to smoke in non-smoking places? The school already has all info on all it’s kids, what else “private” is being revealed here? If you break the rules of the establishment where you are, they’ll try to identify and ban you, because that’s how private property and bylaws work. School is no different. If you break the rules you face the consequences.
Is this logical and useful? No. Does it help kids become better and learn? No. Will it actually reduce vaping? No, it’s a leaderboard now.
But is it invading privacy? Also no. It is enforcing nonsensical draconic rules, but not revealing any information that wouldn’t be already known or demanded by the institution in that situation.
So you think we should all be allowed to smoke in non-smoking places?
No, but I see you need to make up a point I didn’t make so you could attack that.
Lazy strawman, you must be from reddit
Oh the irony. Lol.
… good?
Everyone (even kids) have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but children using drugs in school isn’t something that falls under that reasonable expectation of privacy.
Considering they are only harming themselves, no I do not care much
As others mentioned, I think schools should dedicate resources to address this situation through education, instead of paying some start up for some surveillance gadgets
Considering they are only harming themselves
Again, we’re talking about actual children. You know: people that have yet to mentally develop to the point where they can make fully informed decisions on everything and sometimes have to be “coerced” by reasonable adults into doing so.
So you didn’t read my second paragraph?
I didn’t disagree with that part. Doing what you suggested and using the “vape detectors” aren’t mutually exclusive.
Doing what you suggested and using the “vape detectors” aren’t mutually exclusive.
Well, kind of since I suggested NOT using vape detectors
They are not just harming themselves. Everyone knows how harmful secondhand smoke is.
From vaping? I think you have vaping and smoking confused
Vaping is not the same as smoking and can be done perfectly safely with no drugs involved at all (i.e. flavor only vapes). It’s barely different than inhaling steam.
Edit: I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong, and now think “relatively safely” is a better way of putting this. There’s a few concerns that I’m perfectly happy to live with as an adult, but I get that kids won’t have spent as much time trying to understand the risks.
Imagine defending child vaping 🤮
Lotta Juul fanboys in these comments…
It technically is a kind of steam in fact, actually. Even with drugs involved.
I think it’s literally almost the same shit that’s in fog machines, juice is PG, VG, Flavoring, and Nic, fog machines are (iirc) PG, VG, water, maybe essential oils for smell. You don’t have to use USP food grade VG/PG for the fog though.
I’m getting a lot of downvotes, and maybe I’m wrong about what kinds of vapes kids are using? Obviously if they’re using nicotine vapes, that’s bad and chemically addictive.
But I don’t have a problem with kids vaping the drug-free, flavored juice. It can be habit forming, but so can fidget spinners. As long as it’s not actually dangerous then I don’t see the problem.Nicotine-free vapes still develop the oral habit in children and has been shown to be an easy entry into other vapes. Also propalene glycol really isn’t great for your lungs, and constantly sucking on a vape that uses it does negatively effect your breathing.
Oh God the gateway drug argument can fuck right off.
Honestly, I don’t have much of a problem with them even vaping nicotine, especially once we’re talking high school (ages 14-18.) They’re already not allowed to buy it, that’s enough. Sure, sometimes they’ll evade the law and get it, they’ll do it with white claws too, should we ban those? No, and you’d be hard pressed to find some teetotaler to say “yes” to that, but for some reason that goes right out the window when it’s not “the thing they did as kids” but “the new thing they don’t understand.”
I’d be willing to bet flavored alcohol is more damaging to a young brain, more addictive (or at least on par) with nicotine, and what’s more you can actually die from alcohol (and benzo, which the kids are getting too btw, very illegally) withdrawals, but are we banning Ciroc and Xanax and applying the flavor ban logic unilaterally or are we just singling out the vapes because the big pharma and tobacco lobbies successfully propagandized people into doing their bidding in a war against the most effective smoking cessation method on record to date?
Steam is the hot gas that is produced when water is boiled. It’s also completely see through, ie, invisible.
That is not what the vapes produce. It’s a water vapor. That’s why they’re called “vaporisers” and not “steamers”.
You do get that smoking and vaping are the different things right?
Those things are generally not illegal.
It’s illegal to buy/sell tobacco as/to a minor. It’s not illegal to use tobacco.
Most of the restrictions on smoking are not by law, but policy. 12 states don’t have any sort of ban on tobacco use.
Wow, you’re lame as hell
Is that what we call people who are obviously right now?
pretty wild you can still type with that boot in your mouth. how do you see around it? do you just touch type?
I see critical thinking is not your cup of tea. Might want to take that boot out of your ass.
Somebody teach the kids to protest: get into their REST API and ring it for every desk this stupid sensor is placed in. If you’re better than average, get into the operations of the electric controller which these sensors are powered through and fry them. Cost the school millions and they’ll (maybe) come to their senses
…so kids can freely vape in school buildings during school hours?
It’s not about the vaping it’s about teaching them to not waste public money on stupid shit.
Trying to stop kids from using drugs on school property is “stupid shit”?
Vaping is nothing compared to what they could buy with the money they spent on the whatever exorbitant price this surely costs.
Yes, let people do what they want.
As with smoking, vaping can be very irritating to people nearby who don’t want to smoke, so it’s not simply a matter of letting people do what they want, it’s about behaving in a manner that is socially acceptable when living among other people.
How long before the students gamify it to see who can generate the most alerts?
Or use it to elicit a response somewhere as a distraction for a prank or fight.
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dude fr, classmates next/behind you picking on you? blow a hit at them as a threat, show em what’ll happen if they don’t stop haha
Sure it seems draconian, but how else are we going to get the kids to stop vaping and start smoking cigarettes like we did when we were in high school?
Won’t someone please think of Phillip Morris’ profit margins?
Doesn’t Phillip Morris profit from vapes, too?
Bringing vapes as a popular nicotine delivery system is literally the way tobacco companies are able to proliferate and return smoking into fashion.
Also, smoking should be prohibited as well. Not only because it hurts the smokers themselves, but because others are affected without their consent.
A big salty tear.
Yes they profit from vapes, but they dont have as large a market share, as ‘anyone’ can make vape juice.
It’s easier to make cigarettes than vape juice. Everyone can produce them.
No reason to believe it’s any hard to build a similar monopoly on that, too
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.
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.
It’s not surveilling children, it’s surveilling the byproducts of vaping.
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
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.
