It's a privacy nightmare.
Gotcha!
A Colorado school district is using facial recognition technology to police vaping in bathrooms.
As the Denver Post reports, the Cheyenne Mountain School District in Colorado Springs already boasts a network of 400 AI-powered facial recognition cameras scattered throughout its school buildings. The school district argues they ensure school safety and facilitate responses to emergency situations. Critics, however, argue that spending district money to put kids under sci-fi-esque surveillance comes with a slew of practical and ethical concerns.
According to the report, the company behind the facial recognition cameras has also installed smart air sensors, designed to detect whether a kid is vaping or smoking weed.
The idea is that if the air sensors detect vape or THC-laden smoke in bathrooms, surveillance cameras can then be used to locate and identify the culprit.
"We went down a road of Verkada, even though it's definitely not the cheapest," Greg Miller, executive director of technology for the Cheyenne Mountain district, told the Post. He added that Verkanda's tech has been "critical in multiple incidents" — i.e., at-school vaping — "where we can click on a face and know which door that child exited so they can find them and safely make sure they aren't harming themselves."
To be fair, kids probably shouldn't be vaping at all given the considerable health risks. But relying on an extensive facial recognition system to monitor and police the behavior of kids at school is a deeply dystopian glimpse into the future of the US education system.
Principal Big Brother
Per the Post, Miller — who spoke on a panel during a Verkanda event in Colorado last month — also insisted that the school system takes measures to ensure that there's no constant monitoring of specific students, and maintained that the district's tech spending is all about safety.
But while safety should always be top of mind for educators, experts have consistently warned that the perceived safety benefits of deploying facial recognition are still pretty murky.
"We don't think that the potential benefits — and there's not a whole lot of data to prove those exist — outweigh the harms not only to privacy," Anaya Robinson, senior policy strategist at the ACLU of Colorado, told the Post, "but also the general safety and comfort and ease that students should get to feel in the place they spend the vast majority of their youth."
More on facial recognition: Terrifying Smart Glasses Hack Can Pull Up Personal Info of Nearby Strangers in Seconds
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