BY VANESSA MISOON
Episode #3: Are the kids alright?
I usually begin the column with the first paragraph or two of my in-episode op-ed, but this week I decided to switch it up and lead with the news nuggets and random musings portion of the program. When you get to the bottom — there’s a piece on the use of face recognition in school surveillance, custom written for your deeper intellectual consumption 🤓 Enjoy!
As promised, news nuggets and random musings…
No child left behind ❌ For real this time 🙌
Have you heard of the Syrian refugee kid who grew up to be a super hero? This guy is killing the blockchain game with a dApp that’s giving us ALL the feels 🤗
Apple got me ☠️ with this one ⬇
Raise your hand if you’re hype for more Snap filters 🙋
It’s every real Snappers dream come true! The company is offering an expanded library of filters so that you, your little sister and the entire population of kitty ear wearing filter fanatics can live snap life beyond the carousel 📸
Wanna know if you’re Sub Saharan African? Irish? Well Kairos isn’t gonna tell you anymore.
After more than 10 million photo uploads, Kairos decided to shut down their Diversity recognition App — and the reason might surprise you 😮
What’s in YOUR wallet? 😟
Whatever’s in your wallet, we hope it’s not “threat tagged” — because according to the FBI’s Virtual-Currency Initiative [which is a real thing these days], the dark web + crypto is digitizing illegal drug sales💊
Are the kids alright?
I was forwarded a link by a friend to a NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] article entitled “Facial Recognition Cameras Do Not Belong in Schools” — and the title alone made me cringe. Statements like
“Next year, students as young as 4 or 5 years old who attend public school in Western New York’s Lockport School District could be subject to surveillance from facial recognition technology.”
and
“Lockport spent almost $4 million to acquire the facial recognition system, using state money allocated for schools meant to upgrade or improve their infrastructure and technology.”
— followed.
After a brief moment of silence in acknowledgment of the emotional disturbance I experienced while reading this — let’s get into why anyone in an administrative position in education would choose to spend 4 million dollars on sophisticated surveillance software to watch grade schoolers, rather than using that same 4 million dollars to fund technology programs and infrastructure improvement.
I really don’t want my mind to go to the place it’s trying to go — the place where my instinct tells me that schools are trying to use Face Rec in the criminalization of children for the school-to-prison pipeline. I desperately want to believe that humans who are charged with the safety and development of children, would never do such a thing. But as I’m having this battle for the salvation of humanity in my head, the Internets strikes again. With just one quick Google search of ‘criminalization of children’ — I was returned several links to information about school districts criminally prosecuting kids, for being kids.
I’m not talking about kids carrying guns to school or stabbing other students with knives smuggled in in backpacks — I’m talking about students as young as six having been criminally charged for offenses like throwing tantrums, slamming doors, kicking trashcans, tapping a pen, repeatedly burping, and flying paper airplanes.
This is in real life
In fact, more than 40 percent of US schools have assigned police, often called School Resource Officers (SROs). And as of Jan 1, 2017, in St. Louis County, Missouri, school fights are being treated as class E felonies. Class E felonies?? [insert a full line of head exploding emojis]
So how do these ‘policified’ school districts feel that face recognition can help them combat the crimes of burping, pen tapping, door slamming grade schoolers? They don’t. Face recognition equipped surveillance of children in schools will be used to identify a child who has done something deemed unlawful outside of the visibility of authority, and aid in the creation of a database of children identified as being most likely to commit a crime. It’s the use of face recognition in law enforcement — children’s addition.
Then what? Well, worse case — the kid gets charged with a felony. Best case, he/she’s got an arrest record — a ‘first strike’. In either case, there are potentially life altering consequences.
Remember when you were in school and you, oh I don’t know, stole that Nutty Buddy from the cafeteria on a dare? Got into that fight with the girl/guy who wanted to fight you for no reason?! Now imagine having been escorted out of the school in hand cuffs, fingerprinted, given a mug shot, and having to go to court hoping not to land in one of the multi million dollar juvenile jails being erected faster than dialysis centers.
It’s a new day, my friends. And speaking of juvenile jails, there’s a brand new 35 million dollar facility in Baltimore, where ironically, millions of dollars meant to repair failing heating systems in the district’s schools had to be returned to the state after “… approved projects ran afoul of state regulations meant to prevent waste…”.
So, class, in summation — a 35 million dollar kiddie jail project can be constructed without incident, yet no one could manage a contractor effectively enough to get Baltimore kids heat in the classroom 😕.
These issues are sooooo much bigger than face recognition software, yet re enforce our sentiment that the use of the tech in law enforcement, in any capacity, is wrong — and opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt. The only pipeline Kairos wants to be a part of, is the one that sends kids from coding camps to hackathons.
The Identity Economy™ is written and curated by the team at Kairos.com.
If you want to learn more about Kairos and how Face Recognition can transform your business — drop us a line 😃
