This seems wildly optimistic to me. We see the same complacency and/or unawareness with e.g. Flock in society - the truth is most people really just don't think about it, or even mind when they do.

It's actually "cameras and digital recording devices". My guess is that they meant to say "don't have your phone out in the bathroom" but someone in the meeting went "well my son records stuff on his Nintendo DS all the time" and they changed it.

If you're the kind of guy to bring a tape recorder in there and argue about splitting hairs, I don't think they will look kindly upon you.

Probably not an issue in practice: no one owns them anymore, no one walks around with them 24/7, and they're nigh impossible to use covertly.

Probably because the creepy boy scout leaders used analog video recorders and had a meeting to exclude them. Realistically it's just an oversight... hopefully...

Mental illness as a culprit is a pretty tired explanation of these events. Statistically, mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate it, and in many of these events, there is a clear lack of diagnosable or observable illness to begin with. Besides that, even if you don't believe the numbers here, it's possible to improve mental illness treatment and legislate gun control responsibly, it's not an either-or thing. TLDR "Mental illness" is a very tired, very poor explanation for the phenomenon, not even to mention it perpetuates and encourages stigma.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/04/ce-mental-illness

19 mass stabbings in 2024 in China vs 586 mass shooting incidents in the USA. Per capita, that's even worse.

EDIT: I used ChatGPT 'thinking mode' to get that number for USA. Where mass shooting >= 4 people injured.

Civilized places don't treat "criminals" like that. You'd need further qualifications there to make this kind of thing acceptable (as in "violent criminals" or something like that).

Except kids already voluntarily gave up their own privacy to such an extent that they don't value it whatsoever. The government is lagging here. Kids will record you without consent anywhere and everywhere, post it online, live stream everything they do, overshare with no limits. They don't understand the idea of privacy. They don't even like the idea of privacy.

I guess there's two ways to read a ratio like that. Either A) the false positive rate rounds to 100.00000%, or B) the correct positive rate rounds to 100.00000% and the few that slip through are great tragedies due to "just not investing enough", thus making the false positives worth it.

I'm glad B) at least wasn't made /explicit/ in the article, but damn... they do point at it by implication. You're totally right about the juxtaposition being manipulative.

> The company isn’t aware of any school shootings where its tech was deployed.

A thing that happens 50 times a year, across the entire US has not occurred at any of the small number of pilot schools... where apparently "threats" occur multiple times a day?

EDIT: confirming I agree, emphasis on /explicit/.

> they have implemented a transparent bag policy, it's a real problem.

This makes the assumption that all policies have a reasonable justification, so that the existence of a real problem can be inferred by the implementation of a policy which would only make sense if (1) there was a real problem, and (2) the policy was an effective mitigation.

I would suggest that this assumption is both false and dangerous, in that it makes one trivially manipulable by anyone in a position to set policy.

If it was a real problem they'd have metal detectors and security rather than security theater.

I'm sorry, I hope I don't come off like I'm minimizing a real problem here, but from the outside looking in, it just feels like an entirely alien line of reasoning that could only describe a solution to an imagined problem. However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now, and especially missing the context of being a child with peers that make threats like that weekly. I'm empathetic to that situation, but not to the framing that surveillance is somehow stopping those weekly rumours from being weekly atrocities. That's a huge leap.

When I was in school, the administration would work itself up into fits about "gangs infiltrating the schools" because an 11 year old wore a red or blue hat to class, clearly gang colors and a sign of the times.

This was in a wealthy suburb where people like that have to make up imaginary threats in order to feel something, and what better population to fret about than the kids.

[dead]

I'm sure they're "real" threats to muh auhtoritah.

How dare some teenager thumb their nose at the almighty rules of the state by <checks notes> vaping in the bathroom.

The forests are full of cameras. Trail cams and “game cams” are everywhere and can be hard to spot.

> I imagine these will be in apartments soon.

This would constitute illegal wiretapping. You have a legally-defensible reasonable expectation of privacy in your domicile in the absence of a warrant.

They already are in apartments. Also hospitals, nursing homes, all kinds of places. The talk digs into that.

The rest of the civilized world doesn't seem to have a problem. Their stricter gun control laws seem to work just fine.

Prohibition has historically been proven to not work. Even so, the effectiveness of gun laws can't be measured when neighboring states don't have equivalent restrictions. Saying we have 20,000 gun laws and that they don't inherently work is somewhat misleading.

Ah no, I’m pretty certain allowing the sale of military-grade automatic weapons is the issue. That’s a tool for warfare, and you have deadly shootings every day.

> major government overhaul.

Is this what I think it is?

I made people uncomfortable but they have nothing to reply because I spoke a simple fact.