remote learning – Techdirt (original) (raw)

French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes

from the in-school-we-learn-how-to-be-spied-on dept

A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases.

Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student sitting at home had access to a wealth of knowledge to buttress what they may have actually retained from remote instruction.

Leveling the playing field was the goal. In practice, that meant turning the most sacrosanct of private places — students’ homes and bedrooms — into heavily surveilled spaces… all in the interest of preventing cheating.

Laptop cameras monitored rooms and students’ movements during testing. Internet connections often contributed more to passing grades than students’ knowledge as educators (and their preferred tech partners) viewed inconsistent or dropped connections as indicators of attempted cheating. Malware deliberately installed by schools monitored internet usage before, during, and after tests.

A bedroom is not a classroom, even if that’s where the educating is taking place temporarily due to pandemic restrictions. But that’s how it was perceived and a bunch of opportunistic spyware purveyors rushed to fill the perceived “fairness” void with surveillance software that even the most inveterate stalker might consider too invasive.

Proctorio was on the forefront of this education-adjacent bedroom surveillance. It was particularly enthusiastic about stripping students of their privacy. When it was criticized for going too far, it went further, issuing legal threats and bogus DMCA takedown notices to its detractors.

What was briefly considered acceptable by one set of government employees has been rejected by other government employees. In September 2022, an Ohio state court ruled that scans of students’ rooms during remote learning violated the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches.

Respondus was the test proctoring spyware on the receiving end of that decision. Another competitor in the incredibly invasive field has been hit with an adverse judicial decision, this one originating in France. Karen Cullo delivers the details via the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.

TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.

Yeah, that’s a problem. Government entities can get away with some rights violations as long as they have a “compelling” (in the legal sense of the word) reason for doing so. Preventing students from cheating on tests ain’t it, though. Cheating on classwork has always been a thing. Just because it may now happen in kids’ own bedrooms doesn’t mean the government’s intrusion is justified.

But the legal battle isn’t over yet. This ruling basically says the case can proceed because the court believes the plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged governmental abuse of their rights. More evidence will be needed to ensure a final opinion — one that will hopefully side with students and their privacy. Just because an unforeseen event made things more difficult for schools doesn’t mean they’re allowed to force things to return to something approaching “normal” by any means necessary.

Filed Under: anti-cheat software, france, privacy, remote learning, schools, surveillance
Companies: testwe

Anti-Cheat Student Software Proctorio Issuing DMCA Takedowns Of Fair Use Critiques Over Its Code

from the fail dept

As we’ve discussed before, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutions into remote learning and with it, remote test-taking. One of the issues in all of that is how to ensure students taking exams are doing so without cheating. Some institutions employ humans to watch students over video calls, to ensure they are not doing anything untoward. But many, many others are using software instead that is built to try to catch cheating by algorithmically spotting “clues” of cheating.

Proctorio is one of those anti-cheat platforms. The software has been the subject of some fairly intense criticism from students, many of whom allege both that the software seems to have trouble interpreting what darker-skinned students are doing on the screen and that it requires a ton of bandwidth, which many low-income students simply don’t have access to. Erik Johnson, who is a student and security researcher, wanted to dig into Proctorio’s workings. Given that it’s a browser extension, he simply downloaded it and started digging through the readily available code. He then tweeted out his findings, along with links to Pastebin pages where he had shared the code he references in each tweet. Below are some of the tweets that you can reference for yourself.

Here’s a list of metrics Proctorio looks for & flags:
– Changes in audio levels
– Abnormal clicking
– Abnormal copy & pastes
– Abnormal exam duration
– End times
– Eye movement
– # of faces
– Head movement
– Abnormal movement of mouse
& more https://t.co/iB6zsjvfcB

— Erik Johnson (@ejohnson99) September 8, 2020

It’s important to note that these tweets are part of a regular string that Johnson has put out critiquing the way Proctorio functions. In other words, due to all the consternation over how Proctorio works among students, this is public criticism from a security researcher showing his work from source code that literally anyone can see if they download Proctorio. And, while you can see the tweets above currently, Proctorio initially had them taken down via DMCA takedown requests.

Those three tweets are no longer accessible on Twitter after Proctorio filed its takedown notices. The code shared on Pastebin is also no longer accessible, nor is a copy of the page available from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which said the web address had been “excluded.”

A spokesperson for Twitter told TechCrunch: “Per our copyright policy, we respond to valid copyright complaints sent to us by a copyright owner or their authorized representatives.”

Johnson provided TechCrunch a copy of the takedown notice sent by Twitter, which identified Proctorio’s marketing director John Devoy as the person who requested the takedown on behalf of Proctorio’s chief executive Mike Olsen, who is listed as the copyright owner.

When asked to comment at the time, Proctorio noted that just because anyone can see the code by downloading the software doesn’t mean reproducing it is not a copyright violation. And that’s true, although quite a stupid bit of copyright enforcement. What Proctorio didn’t mention is that this sort of critique and use of copyrighted content in furtherance of that critique is precisely what Fair Use is meant to protect. That the company clearly did this as a method for getting some critical tweets taken down also went unmentioned.

“This is really a textbook example of fair use,” said EFF staff attorney Cara Gagliano. “What Erik did — posting excerpts of Proctorio’s code that showed the software features he was criticizing — is no different from quoting a book in a book review. That it’s code instead of literature doesn’t make the use any less fair.”

“Using DMCA notices to take down critical fair uses like Erik’s is absolutely inappropriate and an abuse of the takedown process,” said Gagliano. “DMCA notices should be lodged only when a copyright owner has a good faith belief that the challenged material infringes their copyrighted work — which requires the copyright owner to consider fair use before hitting send.

Which is probably why Twitter eventually reinstated Johnson’s tweets in their entirety, although the message sent to him was that it did so because Proctorio’s DMCA notice was “incomplete”. Whatever the hell that means. You sort of have to wonder if the incomplete-ness of the notices would have been discovered if Johnson and the EFF hadn’t kicked up a shitstorm about it.

Meanwhile, because of course, a lot more people know about the criticism of Proctorio thanks to its efforts to try to silence criticism. Isn’t there a moniker for that?

Filed Under: anti-cheat, cheating, dmca, erik johnson, proctoring, remote learning, remote test taking, security research, software
Companies: proctorio, twitter

Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible; Naughty Kids In Wuhan Edition

from the masnick's-impossibility-theorem dept

I keep trying to point out that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well for a whole variety of reasons, including the fact that sooner or later some people — or some large groups of people — may try to game the system in totally unexpected ways. Witness this amusing example from the London Review of Books, reporting on the situation in Wuhan, China, which was ground zero for the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak. With everything shut down in and around Wuhan, schools have moved to online learning — and some naughty kids seem to have worked out a way to try to get out of having to do schoolwork: getting the app the schools rely on pulled from the app store via fake negative ratings.

Schools are suspended until further notice. With many workplaces also shut, notoriously absent Chinese fathers have been forced to stay home and entertain their children. Video clips of life under quarantine are trending on TikTok. Children were presumably glad to be off school ? until, that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk?s rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4. The app has had to beg for mercy on social media: ?I?m only five years old myself, please don?t kill me.?

Must tip my cap to the cleverness here, but on the content moderation side it shows, yet again, just how difficult it is to handle content moderation. No one running an app store or other platform prepares for a situation like this. In this case, at least, it seems likely that with so many negative reviews — and now press attention — the platform might take notice and discount the most recent thousands of reviews, but imagine having to keep track of every case where this is happening, often on a much smaller, less obvious, scale?

What seems easy about content moderation almost never is. Everyone seems to think it’s easy until they’re actually running a platform.

Filed Under: content moderation, content moderation at scale, coronavirus, covid-19, dingtalk, ios, remote learning, students, wuhan
Companies: apple