Ep 8 - Who's Watching Our Kids?

18-10-2021 • 35 mins

In an episode which we promise is considerably more entertaining than the subject matter might suggest, the TWW crew take a look at the rise of digital monitoring software within schools and the workplace. We discuss the trade-offs between safety and snooping, the challenges of verifying the success of such tooling, and propose some possibly less alarming ways to help protect children online.

Plus: Sanj finally manages to refuel, Neil shares how he almost lost his job because of Google Analytics, and we get to the bottom of what Gwen would be willing to sacrifice for quicker software updates.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start
01:15 The Stand-Up
06:23 Social Engineering
09:38 This Week's Epic
28:13 News Bytes
34:46 The Wash Up

LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

YouTube: Postman livestream: A Busy Developer's Guide To Testing (Thursday 21st October, 7pm BST)

Black Tech Fest (19th-21st October)

State Of The Browser (30th October)

The Guardian: A boy wrote about his suicide attempt. He didn’t realize his school’s Gaggle software was watching

The 74: New Research: Most Parents and Teachers Have Accepted Student Surveillance As a Safety Tool — But See the Potential For Serious Harm

Gaggle (PDF link): The State of Student Safety 2020/21

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Schools Are Spying on Students – But Students Can Fight Back

Vox: The hidden racism of school discipline, in 7 charts

TechCrunch: Aware raises $60M for tech that monitors internal messaging platforms for legal compliance, sentiment analysis and more