Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School.
Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:
Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I’d give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven’t read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you’re using isn’t scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?
Since you haven’t read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you’re talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you’d like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You’ll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.
The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.
You don’t joke about shooting/harming kids, especially not if you are working close to them.
I get the frustrations of loosing all your work, and it is ridiculous that it happened just by closing the laptop, but you should focus your frustrations toward the software not the kids.
The amount of people in this thread that seem to think invasion of privacy is cool to police thought crime is honestly shocking. The subject and subject matter are completely irrelevant.
In addition, teachers are fucking people and venting and joking in private with close friends is sacrosanct.
My guess is most are very young. Goes to show our civil liberties worldwide, especially since 9/11, have eroded tremendously. Young people have grown up in a world where privacy is a joke and government spying is a foregone conclusion.
I work mostly with people older than myself. The younger ones are shocked by everyone’s lackadaisical privacy practices. The older ones all say, “oh well, it’s everywhere and I have nothing to hide. It’s not like you can get away from it.”
To clarify, I’m not saying any demographic is above poor privacy concerns. But there is a subtle difference between laziness / difficulty understanding how to mitigate the threat and the believe that it isn’t a threat but an okay behavior, however subtle that difference is. I don’t want to sound like an old man tilting at windmills and blaming things on the youth. I actually think it is a problem that they are just suffering, not responsible for.
I realized this because we have a younger engineer who didn’t even have an Adblock running on their browser. When I asked them about it, they just told me that they grew up seeing ads so it doesn’t matter to them 🤯
The idea that mass violence, which happens very rarely all things considered, justifies constant mass surveillance and automated reaction is very troubling. The new “think of the children,” I suppose.
In fact, we also have countries with less surveillance and less mass violence. And that’s most countries these days. There’s been only one single school shooting ever in my country and I actually knew people at that school at the time (my ex had graduated from there, but her cousin was still attending). 8th or 9th grade boy with a strict military father was being bullied by a teacher so he shot the teacher. That teacher would give him bad grades knowing his father would punish him for it (someone said he’d have to run 20 km home from school if he got a bad grade, but I’m not sure if that’s true), mocked him apparently, etc. Not trying to justify the kid’s actions, just illustrating what it took to get someone in a country other than the US to even go that far. He didn’t announce his plans to his friends beforehand AFAIK, so surveillance wouldn’t even have caught it.
Where I live there is little to no mass surveillance, and the only “shootings” in schools are the high school students shooting alcohol hidden from the teachers.
We do have crime, like every other country, but by population count, it’s not that bad.
There are cameras in most key intersection in major cities, and they are monitored by the emergency services, but no plate readers or face recognition whatsoever.
Mass violence that the US as a society endorses by doing nothing to address the root causes of gun access and lack of mental health treatments.
It’s as if they can create the conditions for mass repression and then justify any action.
Ironically the far-right was worried about this 40+ years ago with the “FEMA Camps” narrative - right up until ICE started rounding up citizens and US residents alike in the exact facial fashion described
Dark humour is half of what keeps people going in Jobs where the situation is dire. You have to let it out somehow, if you just let it bottle up you'll explode and won't be able to do the job anymore.
I think of it the way the ACLU thinks about defending racists: it’s totally irrelevant whether or not the joke is fucked up.
The US has worked itself into a horrible situation whereby the protection of the second amendment comes at the cost of all other rights for citizens. Trying to do this without coming out and saying so results in an enmeshment of industry and government that would make Mussolini proud.
I can theoretically understand why terrified parents who can’t think of any other way to protect their children might want this, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. They’re selling everyone out for the appearance of temporary protection from the real problem.
Exactly! The joke is fucked up, and yet we deserve the right to reasonable privacy in spaces where we’re told we can expect reasonable privacy (and the right to have spaces with reasonable privacy). Consent for mass surveillance and tyranny is built from situations like this where the question can be shifted to being about what was done under the presumption of privacy rather than the fact that it was violated.
I believe there are a few things you simply shouldn’t joke about. Killing children is one of those things. But yes, everybody has a fundamental right to their privacy and it’s insane that mass surveillance is becoming more and more common and way too many people seem to just accept or ignore it.
Any restriction on your freedom to say offensive shit must be fascism, right?
Not what I said. But any restriction that leads to law enforcement intervention without a person complaining damn sure is.
Couldn’t you just fuck-off into the woods and enjoy all your freedoms alone?
No, and fuck you for asking. If I have to share the planet with a bunch of copsucking shitbags who believe in thoughtcrime for dead baby jokes but people saying the most horrifically racist, sexist, or homophobic bullshit is just the price of free speech, you can suck it up and deal with there being people out there who can tell the difference between “popular” and “right”.
Me thinking that joking about killing kids isn’t ok makes me a fascist? I don’t quite understand how you got to that conclusion, but ok.
To be clear, I didn’t say people can’t say what they want to. I think that freedom of speech is incredibly important. It’s none of my business what you choose to say if I’m not involved, but I would not be comfortable joking around with such a serious topic. If you are, then more power to you I guess?
The relevant part of my reply was about mass surveillance being bad, and I don’t think that’s a very hot take. What I think about certain dark joke topics doesn’t matter.
I believe there are a few things you simply shouldn’t joke about. Killing children is one of those things.
I don’t think we could be friends. Not because I have a need to make jokes about killing kids, but because I don’t want to spend the whole time worrying about how you’ll take a joke.
That’s fine. I think we’d get along fine if you don’t make a habit of joking about killing kids, slavery, rape or animal abuse. If you think that makes me too sensitive then I’m happy to stay away.
I take solace in this is the top comment, at least.
It’s frightening that many people are fine with this sort of invasion of privacy as long as the reason is “good enough”. This is a knee-jerk, uneducated response that only makes sense to the ignorant. I also expect they’re young, and spent more time looking at their phone than paying attention in class.
If she was in a bar and she was venting to her friends about shooting students or shooting up a school and the bartender heard her and contacted the police, would you call it an invasion of privacy?
The real story is that people consider unencrypted messages on Snapchat “private”.
This isn’t a bar. This is too people joking in their living room. Or at least, that’s how Snapchat conditions you into treating the space.
Your final sentence shows that you know that the first part of your comment is misleading, so It’s curious that you didn’t correct it.
“How they condition you” is irrelevant. You may be “conditioned” to think your little corner of the bar is your private space, but that doesn’t make it so.
This story isn’t a tale of an invasion of privacy, or even a tale of mass surveillance; it’s a tale of people being unable to determine what is private and what isn’t.
I can’t help but wonder if people would be messing this up so badly if it were Snapchat automatically forwarding an alert to the police because they detected an adult soliciting a non adult for sex, or if the police arrived and the teacher was making plans to shoot up a school.
In any event, I’ll save my outrage about invasions of privacy and mass surveillance (both very real concerns) for actual instances where one or both occur.
Maybe we shouldn’t bait-and-switch people by calling something private that is anything but.
This is just victim blaming. These people are victims of corporate deceit, and you’re blaming them for it. What was she wearing? Maybe that contributing to it as well!
Hey, if you want to be angry at Snapchat, be my guest. I have never used it so I don’t know for sure what they claim. I do assume that they never explicitly say your DMs can’t be read by them, because lawyers exist.
There is no victim here. The student teacher did say she was going to shoot up a school. There were no charges filed, and she rightfully lost her job for poor judgement.
If she wanted a truly private conversation, there are plenty of options. Hell, even Facebook encrypts DMs by default, iirc.
People need to learn the difference between “feels private” and “is private”.
I’m reminded a lot of the therapist rule when dealing with suicidal people (Ive had thoughts myself and others in my life so I’ve had enough discussions around this).
Mentioning suicidal ideation usually isn’t enough to warrant a call. What will is when you start planning. If you get into details of how and who you’re contacting.
Here too she just mentioned it off hand and didn’t mention having a plan to go do anything. Seems excessive to do a call on that and really into “thought crime” territory.
I don’t see much of it, luckily. They must be pretty far down in the comments. On Lemmy, of all places, I would expect that sentiment to be near zero. On Reddit though? I would hope it’d be low, but I have a feeling it’d be mixed, at best.
my knee jerk reaction was thinking the same as you but this very paticular case, i am not sure. i havent made up my mind.
lets talk about opposite ends and then talk about snapchat
if a person is sitting in mcdonalds saying they want to shoot up a school, we wouldnt think it weird if someone called the authorities. in fact peoples lives have been saved because someone overheard something
in contrast, a private conversation on signal should never be read and everyone should stop using it if it is read.
now snap chat is neither a public place or an encrypted communication app. it falls in between. it is a social media app. would you be worried if it was facebook? i keep thinking about it. why shouldnt snapchat report it? keep on mind that i have never used snapchat, facebook, or instagram and i thought snapchat was basically for sending pictures. (i am older). but, honest question, why would people expect privacy on snapchat? again, i havent used it and not as “hip”, so i am genuinely asking and this isnt a loaded question
I haven’t used it in some years now but I suspect it’s still the same. Snapchat is a messaging platform with the main form of communication being images showing what the user is doing at the moment, either through direct message which disappears after the receiver views the picture, or through a “story” which is removed after 24 hours. You can send people direct/private messages with just text (and stickers, etc.) as well and those conversations disappear after both parties view the messages and leave the chat page. You have the option to set your stories as “private” so only friends can see it, and you assume a “private” message between you and another user is “private”, or the image you sent to your friend will only be seen by your friend. But people forget (because nobody reads them) that it doesn’t mean they didn’t agree to T&C that tell them that nothing they do on the platform is private and they give snap inc the legal right to use or sell their data. They don’t advertise E2EE, but I’d say a majority of Snapchat users either don’t care to understand the value in E2EE or they have never heard of it and don’t even know what it is.
If I overheard some kids making obvious jokes about shooting a kid at their school while sitting in a public area, I would do nothing, “kids are dumb, they shouldn’t say that shit because it’s a sensitive subject, but obviously they’re not being serious” I would think.
If I overheard them planning a murder of a fellow student, or of anyone, whether with a gun or any method, I would be inclined to call authorities and report it.
Imo, this situation is wrong, it shouldn’t have happened, no planning occurred, it was just a joke, as tasteless as it may have been, it was still just a joke to let off some steam. A crime would have been if they made an elaborate plan on how they’d do it, like waiting for the kid to be alone, and talking about ways to do it without getting caught or saying they would bring a gun to school tomorrow and shoot the kid, these sentences all have planning involved. Saying I want to kill myself after an embarrassing moment or kill someone else after they hurt my feelings doesn’t justify someone calling the cops on me because they fear for my or someone else’s safety and now they’ve ruined my career over a thought that slipped out of my mouth during a moment of emotional distress.
People should be seeing this story and boycotting Snapchat, users stories should be riddled with links to this story and educating friends about why online privacy is important and how to protect themselves, but it won’t be, I’m sure most will not ever even hear about this story. Plus, the comment this person made is obviously controversial so there’s a lot of differing opinions about whether it was okay to say that to someone in a school setting, but this isn’t about that at all, it’s about privacy, doesn’t matter what was said, doesn’t matter where it was said. What matters is that a person said something to another person in confidence and without either of them realizing someone else was spying on them, like a bug being planted in someone’s home. The conversation didn’t happen at a school, it happened on the Internet, in a “private” room.
Preventing crime is and should be a tricky business, because if it was easy then that would mean nobody would have any privacy, physical and digital locks would have to be purchased from the government so they could access anything you have. Houses and cars would be required to have microphones and cameras that our governments would have full access to. Nothing we said, did, or owned would be private. Nothing you invented would be yours, nothing you build would be yours, and nothing that makes you happy/sad/angry/embarrassed/etc. would be yours.
This is blatant proof you are the product and everything you do on the platform is surveiled. Individuals are not as valuable as communities, so ridding their platform of one person means absolutely nothing to them even if it ruins the individuals life in the process. If they started the platform with these controversies, they would have never gotten traction. They got traction because the mechanics of the system give you the impression that you are talking privately and everything you do on this platform “disappears” into nothingness and you don’t have to worry about an embarrassing picture or message coming out years down the road.
Sorry for the long winded response lol
TL;DR
Snapchat gives the false impression of private conversations that disappear forever, sort of like how signal can be configured, but it has a higher priority for image sharing, and of course, nothing is encrypted so nothing is really ever deleted. It doesn’t matter the individual was at a school when they said the thing, the context of what they said is important, and more importantly the fact they said it in confidence is important.
I can try and rephrase: It’s shocking to me how many people support invasions of privacy for the purposes of detecting and prosecuting ideas and thoughts.
I don’t know how to feel about this story. I don’t want people being spied on, but I don’t want any more school shootings either. This person should probably find a different profession.
Thanks for the graph. I wasn’t arguing for mass surveillance, just saying how fucked it is for a teacher to joke about shooting her students. Especially when that graph is showing how big of a problem it is. Do you not get that?
End-to-end encryption on Telegram only exists in Secret Chats, which has to be manually activated. I used it for more than a year without realizing it and sent private financial info across it thinking it would remain private. IMO Signal’s a much better choice.
Signal is better, but if the concern is Telegram scanning messages and automatically sending them to the police, that doesn’t seem to happen either. Durov doesn’t care, for better or worse, like Telegram being used for drugs and terrorism. Although Telegram employees themselves could be snooping through your messages, that’s true
This warrantless mass surveillance technology chain can also easily be used to silence dissent, chill speech, and oppress by race, religion, gender, sexuality, pregnancy status, and any other status so deemed problematic by those with state power. This is not a power delegated to the government by the constitution, and it was not built to protect the people.
We accept impositions on our liberty for the protection of the general welfare. Did this actually protect us?
I know right. The kinda events that they said this was to protect from rarely occur. When you look back they spruiked the word terror and extremist, over and over to get acceptance and now…well now almost everyone fits in that category if your language or moderate actions are not in flavour.
It was a power pretty heavily implied not to belong to the government. And given thet the 9th says that rights exist beyond those explicitly stated, it should be pretty clear.
Anyways we must make the implied right to privacy explicit
we must make the implied right to privacy explicit
I would be interested in reading more about how you imagine this might work.
To be up front, I don’t consider unencrypted messages on someone else’s server to be “private” at all; Snapchat can obviously see everything anyone sends unencrypted on their app. So, that’s where I’m starting from.
In this case it pertains to how the app spent years cultivating an atmosphere indicating discretion. That’s why last time I thought about it (a decade ago) it was mostly popular for sending nudes.
My position here is that the government has been pressuring private companies to give them all the warrantless data they want. And I think they shouldn’t be allowed to ask. Hell I think they should need a warrant to view surveillance data unless someone in the incident consents or the owner of the data is the accuser.
Now I acknowledge that those two paragraphs allow this situation. But I also think that we shouldn’t be holding a reasonable expectation of privacy to what a privacy advocate thinks, it should be what an ordinary citizen and user of a service thinks. In that case, either I’m old and out of touch since my sending tit pics over Snapchat days are long past (I am) and this woman had an atypical expectation of privacy. Or Snapchat isn’t properly expressing to users the degree of surveillance they’re under and this should be taken as private communication and Snapchat should be forced to either change their surveillance levels or work to ensure that the average user understands the level of surveillance they’re under.
So yeah I think this is mostly a consumer rights issue, but it’s also an issue of the government keeps asking for data on private citizens that they shouldn’t be allowed to collect themselves and I don’t think they should even be allowed to ask
If the government asks, they typically need a warrant. (There are exceptions, but they’re fairly narrow). Is there a specific example you’re thinking of?
This scenario, though, is Snapchat volunteering the information. It wouldn’t really make much sense to require the government to get a warrant to recieve a tip, would it?
And shouldn’t we applaud the practice? Sure, in this scenario it was a false positive, but if this student teacher were actually planning to do what she joked about and Snapchat sat on that information, I suspect many of the people poohpoohing Snapchat would be angry that they didn’t inform law enforcement.
I have no idea why people are using Snapchat in 2026; it was never as private or discreet as it pretended to be, as you could just take a picture of the “self deleting” message with another device. However, it sounds like people still using it need to demand E2EE direct messages. It worked for Facebook.
This is why privacy, no access encryption services, VPNs, etc, are becoming so popular. Not because anyone is planning to do anything illegal, but because we don’t trust the people spying on us not to show up at your door. It’s already happening, it wasn’t dramatic or unrealistic like everyone says, even just this article proves it. You should be able to exist freely, without someone over-analysing every text.
Welcome to reality. Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, intsagram, etc. They are not private. Just don’t use them. It’s wild how people are willfully ignorant about this.
This 100%. Everything you write on any of these chats, anything you write in email, anything you exchange digitally can be monitored if it is not end to end encrypted. People are way too ignorant about it. Just because you can’t search your chat history up on Google doesn’t mean you aren’t being tracked, recorded and monitored.
The only “private” thing about snapchat is that it warns you when your friend takes a screenshot of your profile, chat, or snaps. Which you can easily bypass by using a second phone. Well that and disappearing snaps and messages so you can cheat on your spouse more easily.
I was involved with someone a few years younger than myself (fit well into the >=(age/2+7) rule, don’t worry) and she said she wished I had snapchat so she could send me photos privately. I explained to her that 1) I’m not the kind to spread nudes and I delete them after a relationship is over anyway, 2) if I wanted to, I could just as easily use my spare phone to take photos of her snaps so it’s a false sense of security for her and 3) snapchat isn’t end to end encrypted and they store snaps even if I can’t see them again. I then proceeded to explain the importance of end to end encryption to her. I ended up receiving nudes over Signal and kept my word and deleted them when we stopped seeing eachother. But it took quite a bit of trust in me for her to be OK with this, whereas people are much looser on snapchat because nobody actually thinks about how little privacy it REALLY provides.
So, she was willing to trust Snapchat to secure her privacy, whereas you had to earn her trust for her to believe you would secure her privacy, while being in a relationship with you. This goes to show how the population thinks. Corporations will take care of me, but the people around me will fuck me over. 😒
Yes. It’s because a corporation, particularly a distant foreign one, is anonymous so you don’t think about it as much whereas if some local guy leaked her nudes, it would most likely reach her friends and family. At least that’s what I think is the reason.
To the witless idiots defending authoritarianism to stop school shootings, If this sort of shit stopped school shootings then I guess we wouldn’t have school shootings.
I do get the angry anti-2A people willing to take everyone’s guns to stop school shootings, because besides one italian kid shooting an insurance CEO, you aren’t really making good use of that amendment to hold your government accountable in the first place.
I know it’s not nearly the same level, but over on reddit I participated in a thread. Nevermind full context, someone said something about “The first half of life [something]”, someone replied “and the second half of life [something]” and I jokingly said “And the third half of life, you’re dead.”
Couple replied to that - it was minorly amusing in context - and one of them said “Now I’m sad”. So I jokingly said “Well, good news is you won’t be sad when you’re dead”.
Within a few minutes, I got a warning from reddit and the comment removed.
So I appealed the warning (because if AI removes another comment, you get a 3 day suspension, then 7 day, then 30 day, then permanent), but also rephrased the commeny and basically make the joke while not even saying “dead”, but I also rolled my eyes at the reddit AI.
I almost immediately got a permanent ban.
THEN THE STUPIDEST BIT: They overturned the warning BUT KEPT THE PERMANENT BAN.
Fucking idiots.
Dont’ judge me for still spending some time on reddit, I mod a couple of places. THAT account is still going, but I also don’t use that account except to mod because of this bullshit with reddit that’s been getting worse.
there seems to be a disconnect between what the admin does, unbanning and the autobanning from reddits AI moderation, if admins unban an account but the Ai still catches you, because it detected the pattern which got you banned in the first place and bans you any ways, they dont want the filter clean.
I got a warning for saying I wanted to shoot the noisy mic children (in Reddead Redemption within the Reddead Redemption subreddit). I guess next time I say I want to troll badly behaved children in a videogame I’m going to have police called on me now?
I got the warning overturned but AI moderation is fucking ridiculous.
The way things are going, the next time you go on rampage through town while playing Skyrim or Fallout, the actual cops will show up at your door and shoot at you like the guards in the game.
Chat Control was never about scanning text messages, it’s about scanning media to prevent propagation of CSAM. E2EE is very specifically protected and all scanning has to be done client side. Chat Control will “undermine encryption” only in the sense that messenger apps could check shared media files. If it’s even passed it could in theory lead to similar situation (false positives on some media) but right now nothing like this is happening and it’s not clear if it will ever happen while in US police is already being sent to people over texts to friends. So while I agree that we should be vigilant and Chat Control in its current form is not a move in the right direction screaming how EU is oppressing everyone is an exaggeration.
Chat Control 1.0 is in effect and allows providers to scan message content. That can be done with unencrypted messages (exactly like what snapchat did in the article) on the provider’s servers or client side for encrypted messages. This effectively undermines encrytion regarding that provider and the government.
Chat Control 2.0 is where some in the EU propose to make the client side scanning mandatory for CSAM. Which is probably where the accusations of an oppressive EU are coming from. For now this is not im effect and there continues to be heavy pushback.
For now, it sounds like the US and the EU are effectively the same on this matter. Unencrypted messages can be scanned on device or on route, encrypted messages can be scanned client side. Nothing is mandatory for now but there is a clear push to change that.
With the current model and plenty of encrypted alternatives available to text your friends without a police follow-up, it’s on the user to educate themselves and chose wiser
For now, it sounds like the US and the EU are effectively the same on this matter.
One is as of now sending police to interrogate people over text messages and the other is not even scanning anything locally (Chat Control 1.0 allows scanning but no one is actually doing this). “Effectively the same…” People have lost all sense of proportion on this. One has currently implemented automated system to alarm police about possible school shootings based on a single text message where police is actually responding in minutes (not to mention full monitoring of kids school computers and actual police officers assaulting children in schools!) and the other doesn’t even consider school shooting a meaningful risk and does not surveils kids or teachers in any way. Yes, you’re right. It’s pretty much the same.
I will just give up now. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to talk with deranged people.
When I say “the US and the EU are effectively the same on this matter” then I talk about the legal framework that is allowing this to happen. Snapchat can scan in the EU as they did in the US.
You say this is not happening, and honestly I don’t know if anyone is currently scanning under Chat Control 1 or not. It sounds to me though they could if they wanted to.
Has nothing of interest come up yet? Are they scared of GDPR? If they find something, maybe they are reluctant because the public sentiment towards privacy is different and this would blow up in their face? Maybe you are right and they simply don’t scan. I would not rely on it though.
Of course the lived situation in the US is significantly more oppressive than in the EU. The crimes of ICE, the constant surveillance with flock, the fcc threatening free speech… it’s insane. We need to make sure that in the EU the situation won’t escalate as quickly as it did in the US, because there are plenty political parties and some governments who are trying.
and you can see why people dont want to be teachers, because of little shits like the students acting this way and they get no consequences. when before they use to get suspensions and referrals.
closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan
So what awful setup was she running where the laptop doesn’t just sleep on lid close, and the document isn’t still there on wake?
Who prepares a document to work from that isn’t saved?
The rest is some 1984 bullshit, but I’m wondering what the hell is wrong with that laptop.
Might be a Windows user who set to shutdown on lid close because otherwise you open your bag to find a hot laptop with a dead battery, sleep doesn’t really work on Windows for years now.
I always just pressed the shutdown button if I was putting it in a bag. If I was only moving from one place to another, then I wouldn’t want it turn off for just closing it.
This is how Microsoft Word behaves. It disables autosave unless you’re willing to upload to OneDrive. And many laptops right out of the box will be set to shut down the computer if the screen is closed.
So really, what kind of awful setup was she running? Sounds like a pretty bog standard windows installation on a basic consumer laptop.
I see no issue, things worked as advertised. The AI flagged things correctly and since Snapchat never made any promises about encryption it’s on anyone to use it at their own discretion. Maybe more stories like this will help create some awareness about online privacy
I would be behind your statement if you said it 10, or even 5, years ago, but right now, and to use your own term, that teacher is the one being obtuse. Everyone sees all these news on privacy invasion by corporations and governments on a daily basis. Choosing to do nothing about it does not make you a victim.
It would be a different story if there were no alternatives, but that is not the case, at least not yet.
You’re right… and I agree with your sentiment in principal.
I’m just a bit frustrated because I’ve been trying to explain to people that online privacy is important and meta, snapchat, google, etc. can’t be trusted for over a decade now. I hope these stories getting out are more successful than me getting that point across.
I upvoted the comments disagreeing with you but couldn’t downvote yours because sometimes I feel the same way even though I don’t think that way. It’s so frustrating that people keep using those platforms. In my country I literally can’t ditch whatsapp because otherwise my family can’t reach me in an emergency. And when they get a new number they just assume I’m going to see it in their instagram post. How many times I only found out someone got a new number after asking who is the unknown number sending me instagram or tiktok links on whatsapp. Doesn’t matter how many times I explain, it just doesn’t fit in their minds the concept of someone not having an account on those platforms.
No formal court charges were filed. Her student-teaching placement was terminated.
It sounds like she will be okay. Possibly needs to move and it sure will be an expensive lesson to learn. I assume she can continue her education elsewhere. I wouldn’t have been so harsh if the story were more severe. Of course this doesn’t change that in general this is a big issue and vicitm blaming is a bit reckless.
I hope this story will make people more mindful of the risks. The way things are going in the US I wouldn’t be surprised if the AI also reports Quinceañera to ICE.
I get you 100%, most people don’t care and got nothing to hide. I deleted WhatsApp 5-6 years ago, it took a while but everyone important has switched to Signal or Threema eventually. Sometimes I can’t contact a company because all they have is WhatsApp support… it can make some mundane tasks very tiresome.
But regarding my friends, the links to socials have turned into screen recordings (since login is almost always required these days) and that’s nice of them, also a good filter, so I really only get the good stuff.
The way things are going in the US I wouldn’t be surprised if the AI also reports Quinceañera to ICE.
That’s what annoys me the most with the nothing to hide crowd. You only have nothing to hide until they decide to go after something you have. I’m an LGBT person, I’m always one bad election away from having something to hide that could cost me my life. I see plenty of moralists who do tiny, widespread tactics to circumvent business taxes, and it’s so normalized here that they legit don’t realize they already have something to hide. Like yeah, realistically I wouldn’t expect the government to go after those people any time soon, but how the fuck are you literally breaking the law and literally every one of your customers know and you still think you have nothing to hide? I legit don’t understand those people.
Yeah I think our community has not forgotten how quickly the tide can turn on LGBTQ+ rights. In much of western Europe and the US it’s the T we’re defending, if we let the trans community be discriminated against then LG&B are quick to follow.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
As a teacher you should be smart enough to know there is no private conversation to be had on Snapchat. She learned a valuable lesson about her lack of privacy.
Not just that… I’ve met plenty of teachers that were almost completely tech-illiterate and that includes to some degree a few that even taught tech-related classes. Being a teacher doesn’t magically mean you know everything, even within the field you’re specialized in.
Very true, I know plenty of professionals that aren’t the most well versed in their specialist topic.
There’s also a case to be made for the sheer lack of funding going into education that leads to situations where teachers aren’t getting the training they need to be as knowledgeable as possible.
Edit I don’t feelike getting embroiled in the argument below so ill just note that eavesdropping by intelligence agencies is distinctly different from automated escalation by a private company to local law enforcement.
The US government has been spying on “private” communications for a looooooooooong time. Idk if “well over 80 years” is accurate, but sometime around mid last century for sure.
Maybe not over 80 years if only due to the lack of technology (it would have taken a lot of agents manning a lot of switchboards to listen in on every telephone conversation), but saying “at least since the late 60s” wouldn’t be inaccurate at all
100% true, though in the same vein as I said; it would take a lot of agents personally listening in to cover the sheer volume of phonecalls and radio transmissions that occurred over just the US, let alone the level of granularity they have with today’s “every message on every service goes through a datacenter server and is analysed in realtime” mode of surveillance that leads to things like this teacher being raided for a snapchat message faster than the cops responded to Uvalde.
Basically the kind of manpower-heavy surveillance like the Stasi did has been done for a long time, but the full automation of it as done in countries like the US and UK has only been possible for about 4 decades for text (and for just keeping track of who people made voice calls to, but noy the contents of them) and maybe 2 decades for voice contents.
You need digitalization so that all communications are digital and computers to properly automate the tracking of people’s communications and voice-to-text software to convert voice information into text so that the automation also works on the contents of voice comms.
Mind you, what’s being done in the US and UK (and Russia, and China - it’s just that the US and UK were supposed to be Democracies) is the same as the Stasi did in East Germany, just automated and with no need to place eavesdropping devices to eavesdrop on conversations not over communications devices, as people nowadays carry their own personal eavesdropping device with a microphone, camera, full networking and fully controlled American software in it - the smarthphone - so it can just be remotelly ordered to record and conversations and images in its range.
You don’t know they spied on electronic communication during WW2? That’s why it’s called wire-tap… you’d literally tap into the wire and read the signal
Not quite the same thing, because back then, each wire had to be listened to by a human being in order to see if there was anything actionable passing along it, making surveillance a scarce resource that had to be deployed selectively. Now we have machines listening for keywords on all communications passing through a system, and the resource is no longer scarce: they can listen to everyone, and do.
Unfortunately, people’s expectations are still stuck in the phone-tap era.
Telegrams between North America and Europe ran over a single pathway, which ran through England. The British tapped that cable and were spying on German (and everyone else’s) communications sent through them, which is why Germany had to encode their messages to Mexico asking them to join in WW1 to get Texas back.
Why don’t you show me where they advertise as a privacy platform or end to encryption. Or that they’ll sit on a text where a teacher makes a joke about shooting a school?
You have poor expectations and I’m willing to bet the vast majority here would screech if they sat on it and some kid was shot.
Idk if we’d be so angry if the system stopped an angry student from committing an actual shooting. Sounds like the system would have correctly notified authorities and alerted to an actual threat of one occured.
A teacher should know the sensitivity of such a statement, joke or not. Some things you don’t joke about.
At the end of the day, tools like these are helpful when used in their intended way, but are rife with potential for misuse.
Why enact common sense gun laws when we can just expand the surveillance state even more and just violate everyone’s privacy? (Well, almost. I don’t imagine Elon Musk is having his text messages read by an FBI LLM)
Now that you know everything on Snapchat is going through active automated filtering, consider what Snapchat has chosen NOT to flag and is allowing to flow freely, like sex trafficking and the sale of minors.
As unfair and life-changing as this event has been for this young teacher, I think the actual story of what Snapchat (and every other digital communication method) is reading/tracking yet allowing is a much, much bigger story. And dirtier. With billionaires and pedophiles and all manner of nasty allowables we do not yet know.
This will ve the biggest shock to society when people discover what has been known. The only reason people are not blackmailed into compliance and slavery yet is because they have not destabilized the gov enough to get away with it.
Think if they had to explain how they know the color of your shit that day, but they can’t explain where all the cocaine came from or why sex trafficking rings still exist? How did they know everything else but not how that senator bought the crack he was caught smoking?
We can’t be more than a few years away if we continue along this path.
I suspect a lot of the influence of Israel and the US on European politicians who again and again act against the European Public Opinon and in favor of Israel and the US, is the ton of blackmail material those two states have gathered on politicians the world over in the modern era of digital communications mainly via American systems, using portable networked pocket computers running OSes from American companies and which have everything needed to be a fully-features surveillance device, including a camera.
Every single vaguelly criminal or even just shameful action of any European politician with a chance of reaching a position of power, done via or around a smartphone or computer running an American OS and/or using American chat software, is almost certainly stored in a database somewhere.
Certainly that would explain A LOT of what’s going on in European Politics, especially when it comes to Israel turning full-on NAZI whilst European governments mainly just make believe nothing is happening or propose purely symbolic performative measures with zero effectiveness in stopping the Genocide.
That’s a great point. If they aren’t scanning for things, they likely wouldn’t be held responsible, but if they are scanning things, now they are the arbiters of what gets passed on or not.
ChatGPT had an issue where someone got flagged for being a risk, they assessed it in person and decided not to action it, and then something happened. They’re being sued and the Canadian government is getting involved.
What has snapchat now actively decided not to action, where something bad happens, now that we know they read everything?
The first documented school shooting in the US was in the 1920s. While they were not as prevalent, they continued happening and climbing. Then the 90s got way worse, the 2000s even worse. So, mass surveillance has been on the rise just like school shootings have been on the rise. Now read your comment again and see if it makes any sense.
In your country that’s the excuse they use. In mine it’s scams. My country was choosen as one of the pilots for google’s new developer verification program. It’s later getting to your country as well. Scams and school shootings are real issues, yet very different ones, but somehow they both get the same set of “solutions” that don’t solve anything. It’s very naive of you to think they wouldn’t have found another excuse if that one didn’t exist.
Yeah can’t wait until you say something in frustration and get hauled away for it. People supporting this bullshit are the only people who deserve to have it happen to them, and as long as we’re going down the fascism hellslide anyway I’m gonna take some satisfaction in seeing the people who supported the Leopards come to the horrific realization about exactly whose faces were on the menu.
I’m in support of making sure my kids are safe. When someone says something like this, even in frustration, I don’t know if they intend to act on it. I’d rather everyone be safe.
It was absolutely stupid of this teacher to fuck up like this.
But I’d rather the police show up and check on her than have yet another school of bloodied, dead kids.
Oh quit with the haughty hypocritical bullshit. There is no way you have gone your entire life without venting or joking about committing an act of violence against someone or some evil company. Maybe we shouldn’t crucify people for ordinary human behavior. Morbid humor is just part of human communication. If you actually have never done so, I would think there’s something deeply psychologically wrong with you. Like you’re obsessed with appearances and carefully choose every single word to control your public image to the most minute degree.
An example that comes to mind is mockery. People generally find mockery of behaviour/ideas that they find nonsensical to be funny. So if someone proposes that everything can be solved by a good guy with a gun, you can then mock the idea by proposing it for increasingly ridiculous scenarios.
Not as deep rooted as the person who thinks AI snitching and automated police response to a private conversation is ok.
I hope the thought police come for you one day. And I hope absolutely nobody lifts a finger to help you because they don’t approve of whatever you were doing that the thought police came after you for.
Everyone gets outraged when someone shoots up a school then outraged again when it turns out the fbi has been watching them and “didn’t do their job”. Can’t fucking have it both ways.
Someone says “shoot” a kid, they deserve to be questioned.
There’s a difference between “the FBI is watching this person because they present a real or at least realistic threat” and “social media ratting someone out to the state bcs of a joke”.
Idgaf how poor you find the taste of the joke, nobody deserves to be questioned under those circumstances.
Someone says they approve of the thought police, that person should have the entire contents of every device they own made public. Every mother fucking time.
I have not. That’s just fucking weird. And violent. And that is NOT what was said here. So don’t move the goal post. The teacher specifically said “shoot”. Who the fuck even jokes about shooting someone!? That’s sick.
I am a teacher who finished his student teaching the past school year in the Chicagoland area.
I just want to say…the FUCK? This woman was pissed because a student closed her laptop? She claims it “wiped” her lesson plan? No. I’m calling baloney on that story. Her stuff was saved in a cloud environment and would’ve been recovered easily or the OS would’ve saved the working doc.
If this student teacher was frustrated over this extremely small thing, and made a comment like that even “joking” then she is not cut out to be a teacher. At. All. This incident also just killed her career. No school will hire her with this story out there. What a moronic thing to do/say!
The tech issue of flagging this is just a whole other issue though and a good reminder to be careful of context because we are being monitored even when seemingly not.
I’m sorry, but what? I’m a dad to a teen and a new teacher as well, so I have experience in this area.
Everyone is unhinged. Get a grip.
You really don’t understand the profession of teaching if that’s your takeaway of what I said. We all get frustrated with students, but to plainly say “shoot” them, while in a literal school and over social media because a student closed your laptop?
A student teacher shouldn’t be this frustrated at this point in their career or they should consider a different career. Kids do this stuff all the time, especially to each other. Open the laptop, boot up, recover the documents/projects. It’s really not a big deal that warrants a comment about shooting a kid, even as a joke.
If you really feel that is acceptable, then thank you for not teaching kids.
Its a shitty joke. Having consequences for saying something is an okay thing. I agree that they should rethink teaching if this is their perspective. Are we just supposed to let them teach for a decade or two and hope they mellow out? Teachers are supposed to be leaders, they have a higher bar to meet.
Private is the thoughts in your head, everything else is public. This teacher didn’t need to actually say the thought out loud, it could just stay a shitty thought in their head. Maybe they could try some introspection, about why they are so frustrated over something so trivial. Maybe consider why they are so quick to have violent thoughts about people they are in charge of.
Also, besides all of this, who ever thought Snapchat was a private place, even using your definition of the word? They sent a death threat to a public company that is very clear that they monitor the content that flows through their servers.
Context matters, you can’t just leave out the details and say “any privacy violation is bad”. That’s not how society works or else wed all be living alone in caves.
I’m a teacher, in Illinois, where this story is happening, who has gone through the trainings and a Master’s in education. You think there is an instance to talk about shooting a kid?
It’s pretty damn explicit, in everything we do, that we are there for the kids and to protect them. Even if you’re frustrated—a comment like that is warranted? Seriously?
Just making sure you werent the secret police and had no actual power to enforce what is and isn’t an appropriate joke to make in private between your partner or friends.
You think there is an instance to talk about shooting a kid?
Yeah, when you’re venting your frustrations about the little shit in private.
If you think there’s anything acceptable about arresting someone and nuking their career over a joke made in a private forum, you are the one with no business being anywhere near kids. You won’t teach them anything except how to be good subservient little serfs for their corporate masters, and that’s the last thing any kid needs to hear more of.
Please consider another career. I hear the military is a great place for bootlickers. And with your contempt for freedom and privacy you’d probably make a great cop.
You’re going on about bootlickers when the entire point of my post was about teachers should not be making any comments, whatsoever, about shooting a kid.
I can’t believe how wrong some of you Lemmy people are about this whole thing and the critical thinking you all are applying. I’m not even talking about the legality or morality of the tech of it, but rather on this person’s demeanor in a demanding profession with 20-25 different personalities and needs who will test you.
If it bothers you so much maybe stop deepthroating that boot for a minute so we can talk.
the entire point of my post was about teachers should not be making any comments, whatsoever, about shooting a kid.
The entire point of your post was that thoughtcrime is totally valid and should be punishable with state violence and enforced poverty. That makes you a useful idiot for fascism and just a generic idiot for everyone else.
can’t believe how wrong some of you Lemmy people are about this whole thing and the critical thinking you all are applying
Maybe you should try some critical thinking of your own then, and realize that thoughtcrime is never a valid concept.
A teacher joking about shooting a student is no more horrible, nor any less likely than an ER doc joking about motorcyclists being “walking organ donors”. Cops showing up because an AI ratted out a joke someone made in private is 1000 times more horrific and dangerous than someone making a joke you think is over the line.
By the way, do you need a hug?
No, I need a world where “but it’s to protect kids!” doesn’t automatically make most people just happily accept any idiocy the speaker wants to assert.
I can see how this is a big problem. However, having saved a man some time ago from suicide after correctly interpreting a very cryptic message I could see how one such system may be useful if it worked correctly.
The statute is constructed in an unusual way because it doesn’t require that the threat is transmitted to someone who believes it. It says:
(a) A person commits disorderly conduct when he or she knowingly:
…
(3.5) Transmits or causes to be transmitted in any manner a threat of destruction of a school building or school property, or a threat of violence, death, or bodily harm directed against persons at a school, school function, or school event, whether or not school is in session;
Laws against transmitting threats are usually written in a manner that excludes jokes sent to friends who understand that they are jokes.
Also, use Signal. Signal will not call the cops when you send dumb jokes to your friends. There are no good reasons for most people to not use Signal.
Saying you want to shoot students or the school should not be ignored. If you were the parent of the student, would your preferred course of action is do nothing?
Yes the fuck it should if it was said in a private message to close friends.
You wanna open up your DMs on every platform for people to fish through? I’m sure we can find a few things you’ve said that the majority of people would agree aren’t ok things to say.
The amount of times I said I was going to kill my sister in my life would have gotten me arrested if the government were listening to me. Anyone who knows me knows I love my sister, and would obviously never kill her. Hyperbole is frequently used in all aspects of human communication, and anyone who says it should be grounds for investigation is either lying, or stupidly believes that those in power could ever be trusted with such privileges.
Ah yes, the old, “any act of state surveillance is acceptable as long as it in theory could increase the safety of children by the width of a single electron.”
This is what the country that was founded on “give me liberty or give me death” has degenerated into.
I’m fine with monitoring Snapchat and actioning death threats. Not sure if you caught this part, but its AI that monitors looking for death threats, not humans.
The policies you support will, on net, kill far more children than they save. These inevitably have an extremely high false-positive rates. For every one actual school shooter you catch, you end up ruining the lives of a thousand innocent children. Many of those will have their lives completely disrupted, many dying early deaths of from suicide and drug overdose.
The issue with surveillance is that it relies on the assumption that the people with the privilege to access the information are honorable enough to only use it when necessary and only use it truthfully. I don’t trust our country or corporations not to have an AI “hallucinate” a death threat so that they have reasonable cause to detain anyone they want whenever they want.
Plus, I didn’t really think it’s all that different between my sister and I and a teacher and their students. My wife was a teacher, and while she never said she wanted to shoot a student, she’s certainly said she wanted to strangle one. Most of the other teachers I know have said similarly violent things. I also used to work with doctors, and they often say similar things as well.
People with tough jobs often release stress with violent candid statements about things that frustrate them, then go on to obviously never actually do anything violent. Again, it’s called hyperbole, and is a very common thing across all language. Even if this AI was completely infallible and couldn’t be used dishonestly, it would still have so many false positives that it would be nothing more than a boy who cried wolf.
You are describing a policy failing, not technology. I think we can both agree the policy side of things is sorely lacking. Circumstances where people are detained because of AI reporting without ever looking at the evidence themselves just shouldn’t happen.
Try the hyperbole 'Is there a bomb in my suitcase? What do you think, I would put it in a checked bag?" I’m sure the hilarity will be overwhelming.
What I’m describing is our current reality where policies are enacted for “safety” when really they’re to be abused. The news calls them “bad actors” or “rogue officers” but anyone who doesn’t see them as the expected results they are is fooling themselves. Stories like this are to normalize a system specifically being designed to vilify normal people instead of our actual enemies.
We can’t have a discussion about what a moral government would do with surveillance until we have a moral government. It’s so far from happening that the idea that it will ever be used to provide more good than bad is concernedly naive.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t take threats of violence seriously, I’m saying that a person’s private communications should never be publicly available, regardless of what dangers might go undiscovered, because the real danger of such a policy being misused overshadows that risk by orders of magnitude.
I completely agree there are abuses. But outlawing the technology doesn’t change the mindset of law enforcement. In my opinion, we put pressure on lawmakers to make it criminal to abuse this power. We still protect the vulnerable, and our privacy is protected.
Considering its AI reviewing the texts and not humans, general privacy isn’t compromised. Again, let’s deal with the real issue which is abuse of power.
…our president is a criminal who deserves to be in jail, but isn’t. Lawmakers themselves obviously can’t be trusted with this, either. I’d trust a random person off the street more than anyone in the government.
Well, elections and the second amendment, yeah. Hopefully we can build a world where a policy can be made for good that actually does good, but we’ll see.
Shout-out to all the Americans still claiming that they are more democratic than whatever other country. I take great pleasure in seeing the shit hole your country is and is still becoming. ❤️
It’s always been a shithole. The good part was the freedom, you used to be able to be exhasperated and complain to your friends. But we decided instead of improving society that some of us would rather give a bunch of facists cameras and microphones and turns out, those facists are the evil kind of facists, not this mythical “only here to protect us” kind.
I don’t know when it was but realising the American dream was garbage, and I don’t want to travel to the USA was strange.
It wasn’t like a big hit to the face, it was just a slow crumbling of the idea from media.
When you watched friends and saw people in these massive apartments, or huge mcmansions in other shows, it was always something to strive towards, now I actively dislike it. I would hate to live somewhere like that.
There are(were at least, who knows how much longer they will last) some incredible and beautiful places in America, but I also don’t want to risk my life flying there (and it isn’t the planes).
For me at least I feel like it was when the American dream turned from “anyone can do it with hard work and dedication” to “anyone can do it if they exploit others, get lucky, or come from money”.
The dream used to be “work hard and this will be yours” and it seems to have been turned to “work hard and dream about it someday, and maybe you can get close”. And it definitely changed over time. People often forget when the “American dream” came about it wasn’t “get a degree, and be a white collar worker for a chance” like it was with people my age. It was “go to work, wherever, with whatever skill set/background, contribute and you get a piece of the American apple pie”. Over decades though those goal posts have been shifted further and further.
Earning the American dream used to be a given for everyone if you worked hard and contributed, but over time it has devolved with a bunch of extra conditionals of “well that doesn’t count either” until we are left with “the dream exists, but only for a few who can actually get it.”
People these days are turning to betting, day trading, side hustles, and extreme budgeting to even be comfortable in some cases. That’s not how it used to be. You could work any job, minimum wage or not, and the benefits were supposed to be for everyone. That’s not the case anymore, and the American dream has faded along with it
If freedom is the ability to complain, lots of countries with stringer regulations have that. They have it but better, even, because they have a much greater ability to stop it going away.
And liberals and leftists still support the narrative about Venezuela elections being unfair and that the US puppets should rule the country and turn it into a neoliberal hellhole. Including the Swedish Nobel price committee for empire advancement. They will never learn.
A large fraction lemmy.ml literally cannot participate in a thread without bringing up western imperialism. Like, it could be /c/superbowl picture of an owl, and somehow it would devolve into that.
It certainly ruined Venezuela, because liberals and leftists still believe the US is democratic and has the moral high ground to denigrate and interfere.
I literally say when the shit with Venezuela started that a ton of “leftists” as in “left wing politics” or people still fans of Obama - they supported the US action against Venezuela. How does that make sense if they do not think the US is still a democratic country. If you think your country isn’t “A” and accuses another country of not being “A” you’d call it hypocritical and not believe it. But they did.
There is a serious disconnect there, and I believe it starts with doublethink or a type of disconnect where people know the US is not democratic, but still believe the US is democratic and fighting the good fight against “authoritarian” regimes.
Everybody, wait till he learns abut Chat Control and that the same ghouls are lobbying for this kind of legislation worldwide. It’s not JUST America, it’s the underlying capitalist machinery that let’s them subjugate the masses everywhere.
You are unfortunately the country that has led the rest of the world down this evil path. You deserve to be especially shamed for it. Stop being such a bitch and own up to it.
I’m not downvoting you. I am going to tell you that a lot of the world’s troubles can be laid at the feet of the US hegemon, but that the EU and UK’s recent horniness for privacy violations has nothing to do with the US populace.
I would fight just as hard against it, as I am over here trying to educate and rouse the sleeping voices here in my states.
Lemmy has the chance, the small opportunity, to be a Rally Point for building up our communities. How can you and I do that, today?
You’re not even worthy of it. Go let trump destroy your country while crying about how enough ppl didn’t vote or whatever. Doomed to serfdom and deluded by your own hubris. Burn in hell.
That’s the problem though - corporations have too much power and are partly running the country, or at very least assisting political parties and governments. That’s not a sign of democracy
We have lost more people to gun violence in the last thirty years than every US soldier killed in every war. Death by firearm is now the number one killer of US children. I have personally lost several people I grew up with to gun violence.
Almost 50% of US males have a criminal conviction and minorities have a close to a 30% felony conviction rate. Millions of minority and poor families have been destroyed by the war on drugs. People regularly get convicted of crimes they didn’t do because they are manipulated into plea bargains with the threat of massive time behind bars. The US jails more people per capita than just about any other nation.
The unemployment rate for those under thirty is around 40%. Most working class families are priced out of home ownership and going to get a higher education will often indebt you for decades. You are expected to constantly change careers or you will be quickly left behind with median position length of just under four years. Many Americans have up to ten or more jobs in their lifetime due to instability in our economy.
I raised my family for over twenty years with zero health insurance. Going to the hospital is a financially life ending event with bills easily reaching $10k + for even basic procedures unless it is just a few stitches. Medical bills account for 40% of bankruptcies and half a million people go bankrupt every year from medical debt.
I find it amazing propaganda can manipulate rubes so easily into hating each other. The wealthy have truly won.
Yeah, 100% agree. The wealthy also manipulate rubes into thinking that there is no viable alternative, that other countries (mainly China) are so bad and oppressive that the tubes believe they’d rather keep getting fucked than to follow in the footsteps of the Chinese. It’s so prevalent on this website and on Reddit that you’d see Americans claim they’re more free, and this comment was meant for them.
I think we both can agree on what is happening even if we see some things differently. I view the three major fascist leaning states as the US, Russia, and China in that order. While China has done some amazing things there is plenty of valid criticism outside of just western propaganda.
China is great because of the US not despite it. They have made the wealthy more money in a shorter amount of time than any country before it in history working together. China has produced more billionaires than any nation for the third year straight showing zero signs of slowing.
China is currently running cover for the entire industrialized world. If they were really at odds with all the western nations who dog on them then I don’t think they would have cut their oil consumption by almost 5 million barrels a day, thus staving off a collapse of global markets.
American freedom is misnomer and is merely a function of a lot of land spread out that creates a feeling of less government interference which is compounded if you are a privileged white male.
The US government is the universal destroyer of freedom, not the creator of it. I totally agree there are a ton US citizens that are absolutely clueless that they live in the most violent anti-freedom fascist nation in the world.
Speaking of following in the footsteps, this current administration has done several things to come closer to Chinese policy from trying to become more neo-authoritarian to allowing the government a more active role in business. If the current administration succeeds in its current goal the US could become even more of a one-party system than it already is.
It meets all the economic and political definitions.
Keep in mind I believe the entire world has descended into fascism thanks to the US. Also fascism for me is a scale, not all or nothing.
The last straw for me was China providing arms to Africa. Their weapons have already ended up on both sides of the conflicts responsible for killing untold civilians. China is now the world’s fourth largest purveyor of arms.
Is China as bad as the US? Not at all, in fact I really appreciate that their imperialism has been limited. Speaking of the two there is no denying that China has helped propel billionaire’s wealth in the US and vice versa. I personally believe the rise of the billionaire class is responsible for the rise in fascism.
I don’t know the ins and outs of the arming of African countrys by China, but I do know that supplying arms to people defending themselves is a good thing actually. If they end up sending arms to Iran, that’s literally a very good thing in the battle against the fascist global hegemon.
If humans are killing humans, those humans have a right to self defense to save their humanity.
But again, I don’t know the ins and outs of the African arms situation, I guess I was just trying to make a broader point. I also agree with the sliding scale of fascism, there are levels.
However China is much more socialist than fascist oriented in my view.
Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.
Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.
I’m not offering an opinion on the matter, I’d just like to point out that taking pleasure in one does not exclude the ability to take pleasure in the other.
Just the other day there was a post about whether Catholic priests giving confession should be legally mandated reporters of crimes that are confessed to them. Totally opposite vibe in this comment section.
It’s as if people think corporations should be less regulated than religions.
Why would you even joke about shooting someone or committing a school shooting? Not saying what Snapchat did was right, but she kinda asked for it in my opinion.
What people joke about in private messages is their business. Jokes don’t have to be funny to us. People’s private jokes are private, and not for us to judge. How would you feel if suddenly everyone was dissecting something you said in a private conversation?
You do know private conversations dont exist in some other realm right? The words you say still matter, even if the consequences change with the audience.
I’d really only give a pass to comedians, because they are writing material for adults who are specifically choosing to go and hear jokes. The same joke said by a comedian is justified easily by context, while a student teacher saying it simply is not.
They didn’t have to say it, it wasn’t funny, and even if it wasn’t a joke and was “venting”, there isnt much evidence that venting is a positive thing to do.
You don’t get to decide what’s a good and what’s a bad example, dude.
If you don’t see the issue with this, I can’t help you.
Also, no, it’s not a “public forum” - it’s an automated system creating legal issues by spying on private conversations and making decisions on its own
I’m supposed to be upset that the response to making a credible sounding statement about shooting children, whilst having your GPS located in a public school, is that the FBI has to come and see whether its a real threat or not?
Get the fuck out of here with that. Snapchat has never been private. There is no assumption of privacy there, and there’s plenty of information coming out about that for what seems like decades at this point.
And yes, society decides what’s good and what’s bad, and society is made up of people. We do collectively decide good and bad, as well as punishment and deterrent.
While theres plenty of examples of this exact type of situation going horribly in America, this isnt one of them.
Because humor is a survival mechanism. Joking about extremely serious things helps us through hard times.
That’s why some people laugh when they’re upset or angry. That’s why people mime blowing their brains out. That’s why people make suicide jokes or “Don’t come to work tomorrow” or fucking 9/11 jokes.
Like, you wanna be upset about a school shooting joke that was told to people in confidence, that’s fucking insane. Fuck off.
I’m sorry but this “extremely serious thing” that required this “survival mechanism” was a student closing their laptop lid. That really qualifies for you?
Or are you arguing they were using this moment to alleviate the stress they have about constant school shootings across the USA?
This person wasn’t impacted legally in any way. A threat of school shooting had to be investigated. They shouldnt have said what they said whether in “private” or not. Theres literally no defence to it besides “I should be able to say anything”, which makes no sense because that would imply words and thoughts have no impact or meaning.
I’d argue cops showing up is, in fact, a legal impact, unless you believe cops are an extrajudicial force, which is not an inherently incorrect statement.
She was surveiled secretly. She said something in private that she would not have said publicly. It was a joke, even if it was a joke in bad taste to you.
It just feels like this is a really bad way to stop a school shooting, especially considering it did not stop one.
Its a stupid way to catch a school shooting. Especially because its in the news now, potential future shooters know not to post anything or message about anything. I’m not arguing that point, but we can’t talk about real ways to stop mass shootings so we are stuck with this conversation instead I guess.
I think being in private isn’t an excuse to say anything you feel like. There should be social consequences to what was said, but it should likely just be her friend giving push back to the joke even just as distasteful.
… I did not say she shouldn’t face social consequences. I said she shouldn’t face legal ones. Her friends didn’t care about the joke, and thus, her social consequences ended there. That’s why she told a joke that was acceptable within the group she told it to.
This is usually how groups work, so I’m lost on what your problem with this js. Like, if you tell a racist joke to your friends, I don’t think you should face legal consequences for that, either. But you should face the social consequences of that. Same deal.
In my opinion legal consequences are social consequences, so that’s likely where we disagree. The social structures in America are pretty fucked though, so I understand the apprehension.
This person was subject to a whole FBI/local law enforcement team showing up to their place of work, questioning, arresting, and holding them overnight. They not only no longer have a job (you clearly didn’t read the article), but they also will likely not be able to enter the profession they spent 4 years in college to get into.
The closed laptop erased her lesson plan. I don’t know if you know this but teachers don’t get paid for overtime. They do a lot of overtime including writing lesson plans. There’s a lot of unpaid labor that goes into being a teacher and she wasn’t even a full fledged teacher (she’s basically an intern).
She has a bad day and it ended her career before it even started. Because a company that propagates it’s brand by marketing it’s private messages as private decided to surveil it’s users.
Seriously. I’m tired of the haughty Puritans pretending they don’t know what morbid humor is. At my grandfather’s funeral, my whole family was doing it. It’s a way to grieve. For example, he was a farmer. He literally bought the farm. at several points in his life. One of the jokes I remember making was, “he bought the farm, and later he bought the farm!”
My younger brother lived a very troubled life. Struggled with a lot of mental health and related substance abuse issues. Served time in jail after committing armed robbery for drug money. Died in his late 20s from an OD. But he was still my brother, and I still loved him. At his funeral:
“HE’S ROBBING ANGELS NOW!”
Frankly, if someone can’t appreciate morbid humor, I don’t want to be friends with them.
Yea, seems a bit like survivorship bias. Do I believe this person would’ve done something horrible? No, then again, I don’t know them… But do we hear about every angsty teenager who has gotten reported through something like this? No. Why don’t they flaunt how much they may or may not stop violence? Because you can’t really brag about data that is intirely comprised of “maybe this could possibly have happened i guess”.
Sort of the joke in this. Crime in western countries has declined as police hyper-surveillance has increased. I don’t think it is unfair to say that a suffocating perpetual dragnet created by a public-private Big Brother network has contributed to depressed rates of stochastic violence. Or that the few groups capable of committing crimes and getting away with it are the police and sheriffs offices, the individuals in their employment, and the turncoats they use to influence and infiltrate other groups.
We don’t count “preemptively solved crimes”, unless we’re trying to make headlines with “foiled assassination/terrorist plot” to inflate some bureaucrat’s reputation. We also don’t count false positives - people who had their doors kicked in and their family roughed up and their dog shot in the dead of night - when we’re tallying police effectiveness. Out of sight, out of mind.
The only thing we really see is active shooters on the evening news and burglary footage on the local. So we’re always having a “crime problem”. The current police state is never big enough. Surveillance isn’t “real” enough to impact the news cycle, because something is always happening somewhere that can be reported on as the next big Crime Wave.
They did study this. Surveillance makes a lot of sense for parking lots and around houses if there is immediate intervention. Just recording in the street doesn’t do anything.
Sort of the joke in this. Crime in western countries has declined as police hyper-surveillance has increased
Crime has been on a significant downturn ever since lead was removed from gasoline, and thus stopped being vaporized in the air.
Are there places where crime spikes upward? yes, but almost 100% of the time thats caused by the failure of local, state, or federal governments creating disadvantaged, poor, underserviced people. . and you treat people poorly and keep them desperate long enough, then crime is going to occur.
They’ll happily spend millions on the crime part, but they wont even acknowledge the underlying issue that could be addressed for far less than what oppression costs.
Joke aside, every time there were actual review of laws pushed to protect [insert whatever potential victim] from [insert whatever potential threat] at the cost of losing a tiiiiiny bit of freedom, the conclusion is always dire for the said bill/law/mechanism. All countries.
You think authorities wouldnt be on prime time news gloating about stopping attacks before they happened and justifying the privacy destroying bullshit they use as a necessary sacrifice for safety?
It’s not that I think teachers shouldn’t vent about stress. But in this day and age, a teacher who has the poor judgment to vent about stress by expressing the desire to shoot a student, in writing, probably doesn’t belong in the classroom to begin with.
Christ, are we meant to feel sorry for someone who joked about shooting children now? It’s a big enough problem in the US, normalising it is not the way to go
You know who we’re not supposed to feel any empathy at all for?
People dense enough to not understand the difference between a joke a frustrated person made in the moment to intimate friends vs a scripted joke a comedian tells on stage or on TV, and how different those things are in relation to “normalizing” anything.
Maybe if the US removed their “shooting kids” problem it would be acceptable but it seems like a culpable threat to me, doesn’t matter if she said it was a joke after the fact
Oh, I definitely get it but she had means, motive and opportunity to follow through which I think is a little different. Also unless I missed it the article doesn’t state what she actually said so people pieing it off as a joke are ridiculous.
Because they’re her friends, and know her, just like I know the people around me would never do that, and if MAGA arrested one of them, I’d KNOW the problem was MAGA, not my friend.
I wondered if it’s because I am from a low education area, or just different names for different games. We just call them interns in any field. Thanks for the clarification.
Marvel at how AI stopped this non-existent threat, while also giving advice on the best way to kill yourself, or get the highest kill score in a mass shooting, or hack into other corporations.
Sure, this tech isn’t ever going to start directly killing people it has determined are a problem, flipping off life support machines, crashing autonomous vehicles, etc.
I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. People can have morbid humor in the appropriate time and place. If I’m not at an airport, and a joke comes into my head about a bomb at an airport? I’ll happily share that out loud if I’m in an appropriate social setting. Will I do that at an airport? Of course not. If I’m teaching and have a problem student, I’ll feel free to vent, even making a light-hearted joke about “wanting to strangle the little bastard.” In the right place and time, jokes involving threats of violence are perfectly acceptable. Puritans disgust me. It’s always done in bad faith.
Here’s the core problem. These apps literally condition you to view your communications as private. They literally will label things ''private chats." No one expects to be able to like, organize illegal drug deals over Snapchat. But when people hear “private,” their mind immediately treats the space like they would a private conversation in a closed setting.
We still have a lot of cultural reckoning to do with online discussions. A big problem we have right now is that most of our conversations have moved online, even between individuals who know each other IRL. And people always code-switch their conversations. You’ll talk one way in public and another in private with close confidants. A generation ago, someone would make a crude joke in a bar, people would laugh or find it distasteful, and no one would give it a second thought. But online, it exist in a durable form, and that allows bad-faith actors to treat speech much more seriously than it was ever intended.
We need to develop better cultural understanding of what online speech means. For example, I take what I say under this account here much less seriously than I would if I was posting on a social media account under my real name. You should view a pseudonym as someone saying, “My name doesn’t stand behind this. I don’t really take what I write here too seriously. You shouldn’t either. We’re just folks chatting at an airport bar.” But publishing under your own name? That should be viewed like standing on a street corner holding a sign, or writing a letter to the editor under your real name. You’re boldly standing up for your words, and you’ll chose them more carefully accordingly.
People will find some political candidate’s old reddit comments, comments they never put much thought into, and use those to crucify a candidate, citing their half-considered musings as proof of their irredeemable wickedness. We honestly have a lot of growing up to do for how we treat communication. People are very childish about the online communications of others, treating all forms as if they are the most serious forms of expressed beliefs. There’s a time and place for rudeness and crude humor, and we shouldn’t crucify people for being ordinary human beings. That’s how you end up with psychopath politicians who design their entire social life around being as uncontroversial as possible. Honestly, if someone doesn’t appreciate morbid humor? I feel there’s something psychologically wrong with them.
The problem in this case is that Snapchat encourages people to treat their private chats like they would a private conversation between two people in their own home. Yes, their terms of service state they’ll monitor the chat. But they still use dark patterns to encourage you to view the conversation as private and intimate. They do this to make you use the platform more.
Honestly, I see nothing wrong with what this person said. Morbid humor is fine. You would be hard pressed to find a teacher that hasn’t joked about doing something completely inappropriate to a particularly frustrating student. Not always violence. But I’ve certainly vented about wanting to grab a phone out of a student’s hand and smash it with a hammer. Would I actually do that? No. Would I threaten a student with doing that? No. But I’m also repulsed by Puritanical attitudes that pretend this isn’t just a normal way healthy human beings communicate.
Those jokes just happen among close confidants, behind closed doors, and among people who know you’re not being serious. This is just part of being human, and I’m tired of self-righteous haughty people claiming they wouldn’t also be crucified if everything they had ever said was also part of the public record.
Never, ever, ever post dumb stuff like that in public. Don’t shout fire in a movie theater. Don’t shout bomb in an airport. Don’t talk about killing customers in the work groupchat. Unless you own the hardware or are using end-to-end encryption, it’s public. No excuse. User error.
I guarantee you if this teacher killed the student people would be carrying pitchforks over nothing being done about the messages.
Imagine I rent you a hotel room. You expect it to be private. Except hidden in the fine print of the check-in paperwork it states that there are microphones in the hotel room and anything you say there can be reported to the authorities.
That is the comparable situation. Quit equating this to public speech.
These companies encourage us to treat these tools as private. They literally fucking them PRIVATE CHATS. Because that will encourage us to use their platforms more.
If this is going to be the standard, we should make it illegal for companies like this to offer private chats as a feature. If the speech is going to be policed this much, we should make it so everything has to be published, in public, for anyone to see, under your real name.
The problem is the tool is sold as as private, but then policed like you’re standing outside a school with a bullhorn threatening to shoot the place up.
I guarantee you if this teacher killed the student people would be carrying pitchforks over nothing being done about the messages.
You have an expectation of privacy in a hotel room. Privacy over social media is akin to passing a note in a classroom and getting upset the teacher snatches it and reads it. Your “private” messages on Discord are not private.
And e-mail, and FB Messenger and the rest, but people don’t get that. People responding to posts in public forums think they are just talking with one other person because “I don’t see anybody else here” - meanwhile, the post will stay up open and searchable for decades.
Read more carefully. I’m obviously not talking about how these online spaces are legally defined. I’m talking about how the companies instruct their users to use them. I don’t blame people for acting in a way that they’re told they can act.
Your issue is one of branding, which is fair. Though, it is not a social media company’s responsibility to educate users on the distinction between “private” from other users and “encrypted” from government snooping.
That’s the fundamental problem I have with this. I don’t believe in trapping people through gotcha bear traps. If you’re going to be scanning every message for violations of rules, you shouldn’t be advertising that service as private. In fact, they shouldn’t even have DMs in that case.
Microphones in the hotel? No need, you carry them in your pocket almost 24/24. There are some in your car. Even if you don’t have a smartphone, a nice combo of PervGlasses and surrounding phones will be sufficient to get what you’re venting about, so that law enforcement can protect the society from your darkest jokes…
And by the time this is implemented, piece by piece, the very same people claiming it’s acceptable/a good thing will totally agree with the processing: you should mind what you say around people, or alone.
You can know things aren’t totally private and should still be able to make dumb jokes without the FBI getting involved.
Does a dumb joke about a bad experience really merit a ‘realkty check’?
Social Media company reporting suspicious stuff is a good thing. What isn’t good is the zero due diligence. Just right to the FBI.
It is the fault of the social media for auto-flagging things then automatically forwarding to the FBI. I’d like more due diligence from the FBI too, but we don’t know how urgent they thought it was. Again, no due diligence and they auto-forwarded something to the FBI that must have made it seem like an imminent threat.
None of these are good things. Privacy should still be private. If we’re going to tacitly accept that nothing is private on the Internet for ‘safety’, then it should absolutely be called out when that privacy is violated for little to no reason. And again, some due diligence from someone. All of these things being done without anyone looking into it until the FBI is on someone’s door step is not good. Let’s also note that law enforcement jumping hard on bad information has led to plenty of wrongful deaths and injuries.
Don’t mistake my opinion as a condemnation of online privacy. My point was privacy doesn’t exist on the internet without the proper encryption.
As it relates to the topic I think it was stupid to say something the FBI would perceive as a credible threat on something that wasn’t a secure communication. If someone said the same thing in a “private conversation” with an AI chatbot I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI knocked on their door too.
I am not downvoting only because you are already prepared for that
One should assume everything they say on the internet is public, even “private” messages on a social media app
Factually and sadly - true. But this is not how things should be
The person who sent the message needed that reality check after saying something so stupid
Nah. There is a difference between literal meaning and the real thought and intention behind words
Though this was a false alarm, it showed a semblance of responsibly from a social media company that is typically evil and indifferent
It only showed the company to be evil and indifferent. The evidence towards this interpretation is that at least I have not once heard of any actual crime-about-to-happen they stopped. So they can fuck right off with this
It is not the fault of the social media company that the FBI chose to act on the information
It is their fault for violating their users’ privacy in a manner that does no good and much harm. It is even bigger fault to let any part of the process between “someone sent message” and “it has been reported to officials” be handled by automation without any human overseing. It is going to be even bigger fault if there was actually a human involved and they just let this happen
I fully agree with how all of this is authoritarian bullshit but I can’t escape that nagging feeling that this too is about the US, the only country in the world where these shootings are daily occurrences; I get that people get ichy about even jokes like these
I fear that we are training our population to suppress the signs, to just “go off” without warnings. If we deploy SWAT every time somebody repeats some violent threat joke they heard in 785 movies and TV shows over the past 20 years, people are going to get better at filtering that - and actual signs that they’re about to “go postal.”
As for that, what happens when I’m watching some indie movie from a DVD that Alexa doesn’t recognize and Alexa hears the character in the movie plotting to do some (better not say it here in detail) very plausible copycat of something like Timothy McVeigh and his little truck bomb? Alexa mistakes that audio snippet for actual people in the house and reports it…
usa is “paranoid” about that, but still most people see no problem about having a pedo-rapist as a country chairman, and wiping civilians using drones and missiles in war that mentioned before chairman started.
I admit, as an outsider looking in, I am a bit surprised how many people are okay with these jokes.
It’s just a joke until it isn’t, and then it isn’t so funny. However, I do get that it can literally just be a joke and nothing more, but I do have a hard time compartmentalizing it like that.
With that said, just like anyone else here, I’m not really a fan of mass surveillance either so I obviously feel conflicted.
Here’s the thing. It’s an off color joke. Snapchat didn’t report her “master plan” to smuggle weapons into the school.
It reported what was essentially a private vent session from a woman who is young enough to have lived through a lot of the security theater of the active shooter drills happening in schools across the US to this day.
It would be like a boomer or perhaps Gen X’r making a joke about bomb shelters.
Or a millennial making jokes about suicide or bomb threats (both of which are things a lot of millennials actually have made jokes about).
Is it a cool thing to say in mixed company? No. But she wasn’t saying it in mixed company. She was talking to her boyfriend. She had the expectation that it was a private conversation.
It’s extremely likely that she wouldn’t have made the same joke if she had known it wasn’t private.
In any case though, you don’t have to be okay with the joke to see that this is basically an algorithmic invasion of someone’s expected privacy and that is an overstep in the name of security that actually violates privacy for security theatre.
You mean to tell me they can scramble a whole FBI team in less than an hour for a “terroristic threat” that isn’t even viable, but they let all those kids get shot in Uvalde?
There have been multiple active shooters who actually posted manifestos online before they committed the acts and those guys didn’t get a visit from the FBI in full riot gear.
How many people do you know who have made a joke about killing their boss? When I was in the Navy, Marines used to deliberately make dead baby jokes for the shock value. It’s not okay, but it is a fact that it happens and that’s unlikely to change.
It’s more of a vent than a joke. “In private” with trusted friends. If this was something said out loud or even on a public tweet I’d get it. But this seems to fall closer to something like confiding in therapy than that.
Ofc, a trained therapist would understan this is a rant. The AI does not, and the FBI couldn’t care less about context.
I still use it with friends. Not because it’s private (it’s obviously not) and not because it’s good(it’s infested with ads) but because of the convenience of having the ability to send silly inconsequential videos and photos throughout the day without having to worry about that content consuming space on my device or having to go back and clean said content from my device. In that way I find it pretty convenient. That said, from a privacy standpoint it’s probably worse than most other options. Don’t use it with any expectations of privacy.
You can joke about everything, but not with everyone.
She was venting to her boyfriend. It was never meant to become public, or shared in a group, or anyone but her boyfriend, who, lets be bold and assume, knows her enough to assess if she’s really joking or she’s having a nervous breakdown.
So yes: the one and only issue here, is a Snapchat conversation is never a 1:1 conversation, nor are Instagram, Whatsapp, FB Messenger and what not discussions.
Putting the blame on her is normalizing global surveillance.
She’s 22, she spent her whole life in shooting drills at school. She might have survived one herself. That’s a generational experience similar to the Millennial suicide jokes. The solution is societal, not this.
Maybe we should fix the society that lets firearms be the number one cause of child death, and not punish people who develop coping mechanisms that come from said society? She probably hears school shooting jokes all day long.
I am really surprised this shocks you. By curiosity which culture are you from?
I think I can find countless comedy tv show scenes where some character says something like “ugh I am going to kill him” to show frustration, but it’s perfectly obvious it’s just an expression.
Again, she’s a fucking elementary school teacher! That not an acceptable “joke” from someone like that.
And I’m american btw. I don’t think we should be normalizing school teachers making mass shooting jokes. That is absolutely not the same as a fictional character reading from a script.
Becoming an elementary schoolteacher does not magically extract you from the culture you have been living in your whole life.
It’s not a mass shooting job, it’s “shooting the student” that made her loose her work, according to the article.
The reason I mentioned comedy TV shows, is that they are a good source of what’s consensual behavior for the time and place where they have been created. Those TV shows have this kind of behavior because they are also a normal behavior in society.
Those shows are mostly American (but I have observed the same in France, Spain, and Japan), so it seems your are an exception there with your intolerance of this common human behavior.
Where do you find the list of acceptable jokes and who gives a fuck about it? Grow the fuck up dude, your culture is sick and making jokes about it is a coping mechanism.
The formatting on your post doesn’t appear correctly. If you are using an app to access Lemmy, it likely its own mark down that doesn’t work outside of that app.
I know that the apps are all over the place for formatting, butI had thought that all of Lemmy used the same markdown. If you are using the standard webclient, then guess that isn’t the case.
My gawd. People are missing the issue here. You described it pretty well OP.
Yes there are weirdos and they must be caught. Algorithms are getting out of hand though, targeting their wrong people and not the weirdos. There is a massive privacy issue here. Must every text that we send be accessible by the government? I don’t buy the argument of “I have nothing to hide”. When you are in the hot seat they will use any info they can get their hands on. make an offside joke they will use it.
Even people who have “nothing to hide” aren’t safe.
I’ve lost track of the number of articles about people who were wrongly accused by “AI” camera systems or flagged for arrest because their (relatively common-seeming) name matches or is close to an entirely different person who is a legitimate suspect. Some of those people have been jailed for weeks and have lost their jobs over what amounts to a clerical error.
Real US judges have ruled that click-wrapped ToSes are not legally binding, since they commonly are bypassed, and app developers use dark patterns to discourage end users from reading them.
Also, ToSes and EULAs are notoriously verbose and difficult to read. People with college level reading skills struggle with them.
So no, blaming the end user is not appropriate here.
People with college level reading skills struggle with them.
That’s a bigger deal than you may think it is, given that US college students are testing dumber and dumber every year, and is accelerating thanks to AI.
Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.
If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.
But it’s also incredibly fucked up that you have to censor yourself in basically all public forums (including just being outside in many places) just incase a person or bot accidentally or maliciously interprets what you said as arrest worthy. Controlling speech is the first step to controlling thought.
As an anarchist, I’m be tempted to start a Snapchat account and then send NSA Haikus. (The website generator is defunct, but GitHub still has a repository.)
In fact, the appropriate response is to start regularly including phrases that the AI might flag (say quotes from fiction, cited as such) to generate false positives. Especially if your criminal and political records are completely benign.
Or that it’s not and it’s a good way for the government to keep tabs on them à la ANOM. Me and my boys have been using PiGN. Find a bird, attach a note, hope it gets there. Anything else is a crapshoot about actually being secure.
It’s “our brave resistance agents against their dirty terrorists” kind of thinking. People have aversion to perceiving Nazis as same as them by any criterion.
Pedos sharing their stuff spoil spaces quite a bit.
I mean, it’s far nicer to look for pr0n, or even sfw material, without looking at results with pedo keywords in title sometimes. Talking about ed2k. While I’ve stopped using it lately due to simply not pirating as much, and especially not looking for that specific pr0n movie with that specific one actress that’s nowhere to be found, which ed2k is best for, - honestly that part might have been the main subconscious reason. Moderation is good. Horse porn is funny (it’s technically animal abuse, but the way horse breeding works it’s not that much different) to find, gore seems to be a thing of the past, but that I don’t like.
Nazis are usually those harmless folks posting their, eh, literature, and sometimes long hardly understandable posts about race and alternative history. Usually that’s all text. Their, eh, music is generally not forbidden and available on mainstream sites.
OK, what I was even trying to say - there’s a difference between stinky ideology and crime records being shared, the latter is far more repealing. I’m not afraid of reading yet another post about Hyperborea, Aryans, space lizards and such. I am afraid of occasionally happening upon a murder recording. EDIT1: Or a rape recording.
EDIT2:
At the same time some people seem to think that some media being usable for secret communications of a group that sometimes somewhere wishes to raise an armed rebellion or something like that is closer to the latter than to the former, for me it isn’t.
Wrong lesson. All the ways to track you combined don’t leave you an outlet.
Signal is fine to make you feel better.
It’s a social problem that should be solved by social, not technical, means. Awareness, law, burning tires.
EDIT: for moral clarity’s sake - I live in Russia, I’m not spreading awareness mostly, I’m not trying to change any law and sure as hell I’m not burning tires ; but if you live in a democratic country with courts and presumption of innocence until proven guilty yadda-yadda, you might try those
Compared to Russia it is, but there’s a lower threshold to start having rights, expressed in money you have to spend on lawyers.
In case of Russia no amount of money is enough to make it democratic and lawful even in some separate, specific, one can even say - personal, situation.
It’s the fallacy of “if it’s bad here, that means that other bad place is similarly bad”, no, that other bad place is an order of magnitude worse, but you are refusing to accept that due to lack of experience. And there’s “worse” someplace else. In many other places, actually.
I live in the United States. Crime is not about behavior or adherence to law, but who we are. Those of us who cannot afford lawyers will be framed by law enforcement or coerced into confession, or extorted into a plea deal.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
So we’re not a liberal, democratic society with rule of law.
In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution. There are places where this is unthinkable.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
Yes, that’s because the public has ideologies and corporate interests, and no common idea of what it means “to serve the public”.
In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution
You are obviously not watching the dozens of phone videos displaying counterexamples to this statement.
Granted, it’s true for a shrinking privileged set, and the US saw for the first time in the 2014 Ferguson Unrest, just how brutal and militant the police will get if protests or rudeness to officers occur in a minority neighborhood. It’s not that police brutality wasn’t common before, but this time there were press on the ground streaming live video to the internet, and it wasn’t being filtered through news agencies.
Conservative protests get the light touch, such as the 2017 Unite the Right rally. In contrast, the George Floyd protests in 2020 were saturated with CS gas just like Ferguson in 2014.
Granted, protestors taken to court by the current regime are usually acquitted (if a grand jury succeeds in indicting them; they’re failing a lot), but then we’re now seeing protestors accused of being part of an Antifa terrorist conspiracy, and getting sentenced disproportionately for minor crimes.
Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they’re legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.
Even birthright citizenship is being challenged, and that face-eating leopard is going to take a lot of Americans by surprise.
When I say “in your society you can”, I don’t mean there won’t be pain. I mean it’s socially acceptable.
Some people live in societies with a significant portion of the population just blanket hating you (I mean, me and people of my views, for example) and thinking you (again, me) shouldn’t exist, because their TV tells them that and they are used to thinking that it’s moral and honest to believe what their TV says. There are people in Russia who think that voting for someone other than currently ruling party’s candidate in presidential and other elections is morally treason. You don’t even feel how far really degraded societies are from yours. There are literally people thinking that even doing what even Putin still allows them to do is treason.
There are political quasi-religions postulating that living and letting live, and also peacefully facing those you don’t agree with, and accepting that robbing others is bad, and accepting that some things are just not your business, - that all these things are impossible heresy and should be killed with fire.
Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they’re legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.
And that’s a level above not presuming any civil rights. And that is a level above thinking that even talking about such is weird and not normal.
And even deeper there’s preemptive obedience, where even asking someone expecting obedience from you to express that demand before you follow it is considered disobedience and you only have yourself to blame.
After that there’s worse, like today’s jihadi Syria or emirate Afghanistan or some village in India.
There is noaccurated and efficient automation when it comes to people. Sure you can flag some phrase that gets sent but unless you know the person there is no way you can say if it’s a real threat or not. You will need someone to go through months of messages and phone their friends and family to understand if it’s a real potential threat or just a joke/dark humour/bad day.
Having automatic phrases or words that might alert FBI about an imminent threat is just stupid.
If anything put them on a watchlist where an investigator is sent out, but that’s it.
The headline of this article should have mentioned the reason her communication was flagged was because she mentioned shooting the student or the school. When you send a text, or Snapchat message, you are stripping out a wide range of non-verbal communication including intent and seriousness. So when someone sends a message with the comment that they might shoot a student or the school there is no way to judge these things. The last thing Snapchat wants or needs is an actual school shooting occurring that can be traced back to the shooter actually mentioning their intent to do so on their platform. With no way to judge intent Snapchat had to have a way to address these concerns. If an actual shooting was prevented then Snapchat would be lauded. Otherwise it’s spun like this article implying it’s a breach of privacy.
The world with social media is much different than the world before it. It’s changed the way people think, the types of things they think about and what they consider important. It therefore changes the way they act. Combine this with the ever growing surveillance state that intentionally wants to manipulate us and is able to do so at scale and speed and we find ourselves in the giant and dangerous mess we’re in now.
Except Snapchat doesn’t have to surveil its customers and we really don’t want it to.
Does Apple surveil iMessages? Does your cell carrier need to monitor your text messages? Does it listen to your calls to see if you make terroristic threats?
Some bad things might be prevented if we “listened in” to all communications and then triggered a police response when something alarming was said. But doing so is ripe for abuse by those in power as well and that’s why warrants are required before surveillance and the invasion of your privacy is allowed. No warrant was necessary here because Snapchat makes you accept the surveillance under its terms of use, which all apps and cell carriers could technically do. And your Amazon Alexas. We don’t want that. Without privacy you don’t have freedom.
Your cell carrier might surveil your sms tbh and your phone calls totally could be as well. If something isn’t end to end encrypted it’s probably a good idea to assume it is surveilled.
People really need to quit acting like there’s an expectation of privacy on what is essentially someone else’s land. You’re perfectly free to fedpost on your own damn service, but don’t expect companies to be okay with you making the same kinds of “jokes” that hundreds of kids that went to commit mass shootings did. This isn’t 2000, there are consequences to this kind of action.
So we should grant permission to our cell carrier to listen in on our calls and read our text messages too without warrant? Of course they’ll sell your data too.
Don’t give up your freedom and your constitutional right to privacy.
Very disturbing, it was the last straw to switch my chats (besides family) to Signal.
I had held onto Telegram for years because of their fun animated stickers, but yesterday discovered that Signal has those too, actually all sets from Telegram are available on unofficial Signal sticker sites, so now I’m all sorted 😅
For anyone that doesn’t know this yet, Telegram isn’t secure - your messages are decrypted in the middle, on their servers. It’s a shame they’ve got such a fun app otherwise
It’s pretty incredible how we leave digital footprints everywhere. Like the Device IDs that Windows uses on Win 11/10. They can find you pretty easily based on just that alone.
It’s a terrible thing that’s happened, but fuck gadgetreview for that shitty misleading clickbait headline.
Editor knew they wouldn’t get the same impact with “teacher posted in a group chat that they were going to shoot a student”, so “group” becomes “private” and the detail about the threat gets moved way down into the article body. This is a journal who clearly wants to tell you what to think.
A group chat between 4 people should be just as private of a chat than between two people. Private isn’t a quantity, you can have a private chat with 100 people if you wanted. However clearly none of its actually private.
I’m not trying to defend Snapchat here, but the suggestion that any reasonable person would describe broadcasting to an audience of 100 users as “sending a private message” is just not in touch with reality
I’m glad this person’s life was semi-ruined by using big tech.
I am tired of normies using horrible platforms and then acting Pikachu-level shocked when they have horrible privacy violations.
Tech illiteracy + Big tech exploiting tech illiteracy = profit and constant surveilance
and normies are too damn stupid to get it, and every once in a while one of them gets fucked, and then… suddenly… nothing changes yet again
and these normies with their acceptance of any TOS, even the shittiest of shit, and making opting out some sort of social misstep, like “What?! You really don’t use WhatsApp?” with an ugly look, means I am glad these assholes occasionally suffer for their ignorance