Snapchat’s automated system flagged a private DM to three contacts and triggered an FBI alert in under 60 minutes, ending her teaching career
“private” snapchat.
The privacy vs convenience trade-off is real. I’ve been slowly replacing cloud services with self-hosted alternatives on my homelab: Nextcloud for files, Jellyfin for media, Immich for photos, and Gitea for code. The upfront setup effort is real, but waking up knowing your data is truly yours? Worth every minute. What’s the one service you’d never self-host?
Well kinda. Take this example. They could have used Signal at near zero risk. No burden, no inconvenience, simple.
Of course in many situations it is a hassle to switch, but this was not one of them.
We have been using simplex for years now, but my wife and son also have whatsapp because their friends are on there. This week I found out they also use it to message eachother, out of convenience… I’m not one to force, just a little disappointed.
@privacy Very insightful post! The balance between convenience and privacy is always tricky. I’ve been progressively moving away from cloud services to self-hosted alternatives. Nextcloud for files, Matrix for messaging, and Gitea for code. The initial setup takes effort but the control you gain is worth it.
oh but I thought you had nothing to hide Sharon?
I thought you didn’t care about using private messaging?
I thought you said to me that Signal is used only for creeps and drug dealers that need to hide from the police?
Well, thank god you’re not one of those, I guess…good for you Sharon
Where does it say her name is Sharon? Why do you think she cares about private messaging?
Hes talking about his fictional or fictionalized coworker “sharon”, who presumably believes privacy is for criminals
Exactly my point
The entire thing is incredibly sexist.
I can’t stand the whole Karen thing and would agree with you on the sexism there. But in this case, the article uses “her” and so in the fun little pretend story, using a feminine name makes sense. The same as if the teacher were male you could say, “I thought you had nothing to hide Dave”
And still Snap says they can’t stop the snap drug trade…
By all that is both sacred and profane do not click the link without an ad blocker enabled!
The link wouldn’t let me read it with an adblocker enabled. A window took up the screen telling me to disable it.
Which is why I went to an archive site and read it there.
This is the way 👍
Use a Javascript blocker, as well.
I have uBlock Origin and NoScript, together they disabled the ads and the demand to turn off your blocker.
This is a good thing, though. Anyone so antagonistic to readers needs to be avoided.
Private message - it isn’t private if it can get flagged 😅 … and seriously, think about everything you have ever said or written, imagine someone taking one of those private sentences out of context… To even think that was a real threat you had to act upon says tons about the country and system, the work- and school environment. Just sad really😢
Oh, I don’t have to imagine it. I once got suspended for two weeks after telling my bullies to “drop dead.” Apparently that’s a “threat.” The context of the phrase never came into play, no investigation into why I’d feel compelled to say something like that, because fuck the victims of bullying, right?
The system has been pouncing on people for snippets of out-of-context phrases for decades. Unfortunately, they rarely catch the people who actually act out their violence.
That’s why big tech renamed them to direct messages (DM).
POV I’m walking past an elementary school.
she sent a private Snapchat message referencing shooting the child or the school
Yeah talking about committing a school shooting is going to get you flagged.
“should I shoot him?” is not a threat.
Also, who made you the judge jury and executioner of Snapchat messages that get you fired from your job?
That’s the AI’s job and I don’t want to see you stealing jobs from hard working AIs.
I don’t think the government should be reading private messages
They’re not private. Never were. Snapchat was always a lie.
exactly. someone letting off steam to family or friends is as old as time. heck. bar conversation even.
I don’t think teachers should joke about shooting a student…
Such behavior leads me to believe that this individual has a strong tendency to act on their emotions which is a very bad trait for someone working with children. If nothing else it shows that they have poor judgememt.
They shouldn’t, but that’s irrelevant to “should an allegedly private message be preemptively shared with the government?”
🙄
in private conversations this happens. they are expressing how high the frustration was with what happened with people close enough to them to know it is not serious. things like this have been said on the phone and in bars for ages.
It usually (probably) isn’t. Snapchat (meta) is reading your private messages and then sending problematic ones to the government.
If you don’t like that, then you should be using a messaging system that’s actually private. Which means, at a bare minimum, end-to-end encryption.
Snapchat is not owned by Meta
tangent, but:
and yet Facebook still snooped on Snapchat via MITM attacks
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/
Not owned by meta yet
True but in this case the automated system got it right
Did they? Was this a genuine threat to student safety?
And even if they did get it right, how much privacy is worth giving up? How much would you like your speech chilled?
If a student teacher sent something like that to me I would almost certainly turn them for the safety of all involved. “Jokes” about violence is often times a sign of poor mental health.
Just to be clear I don’t support mass surveillance. However, I also can’t condone violence or threats of violence especially against children.
It almost certainly was not a sincere threat of violence. No one is asking you to condone threats of violence against children. You can narc on your friends all you like, but that’s a separate discussion.
Pick up that can
While I don’t support mass surveillance, this seems to be a case where it was in the right
“I don’t support fascism, but in this case it’s a good thing.”
One reason why you need to use a proper privacy respecting E2EE messaging e.g. Signal.
Bonus points for one that does not even have your personal information e.g. Session.
Session is unfortunately not really an improvement. Signal have started work on options which won’t need a number to register, I’d rather wait for that
+1 for session
also matrix…Wasn’t session closing down?
Yes, but they met their funding goal, pared their team, and are alive and well, for the time being.
Add Delta Chat, Briar and Cwtch to that list!
Briar is in a whole different league, definitely one to use, but at that point may as well add Meshtastic stuff to the list.
Reticulum at that point. Probably its best use case
SimpleX best so far. Decentralized but not federated, anonymous and with multi-hops
Session is pretty much dead at this point
Ah yes noted - if one wants to discuss schooting schoolchildren, they should do it on Signal. /s
That’s the point, she wasn’t doing any crime and was punished anyways. You need to protect yourself from tyranny with the proper tools.
Jamil has entered the chat. P2P with E2EE, so you only ever need some internet connection to stay in touch, no servers to be taken down.
The only problem is that it’ll eat your phone’s battery like chrome eats RAM
Oh cool. “Thought crime”. Great.
What I don’t get is how simply closing the laptop deletes anything.
On every laptop and every OS I used closing the lid just makes it go to sleep and everything is the same when you open it back up again. Never was anything deleted.
If somebody know a scenario where stuff would be deleted, please explain so that I can avoid it.
Bad webapp that locks the account when the computer goes to sleep
You can set the lid-close trigger to do nothing, suspend, hibernate, or shut down. I’m assuming it was an unsaved document and the lid was set to shutdown on close.
When my PC suspends it unmounts the sd card, which can cause data loss if I am working on something that is not saved to the internal SSD.
I wanna know what monster sets the lid close action to shut down.
Like yeah it should be an option. But nobody should ever pick that option. And anyone who does should be shunned and socially isolated.
you have to go out of your way to disable autosaving drafts these days
Maybe that’s what it was; set it to disable autosave, i.e., save to the cloud so microsofts AI can scan in puke it up somewhere else.
The real question is who has an unsaved lesson plan open on their laptop. Just fuckin’ improv style teaching method.
The same person who would “joke” about shooting a student
ok… in my experience when shutting down windows it asks to save files and blocks the shutdown until then. Same for kde linux. No idea what mac does.
Mac just silently saves a draft and brings it back up “unsaved” when you open the program again.
While I don’t support mass surveillance I do think it is entirely inappropriate to “joke” about shooting someone.
Good thing you’re not friends with this random person in Illinois.
A student had walked up to her laptop and deleted her lesson plan mid-class. frustrated, she typed something like “should I shoot him” with a gun emoji.
Yeah not getting any sympathy from me on that one…
It was a private message. You’ve never engaged in hyperbole with your friends?
About shooting children? No. Absolutely not.
Somebody report Bill Watterson for threatening children.
Seriously, I’ve never met an involved parent (or any other child caretaker) who didn’t admit to moments of hyperbole like this, even if only internally. You’re just being a judgemental prick.
ugh. I have met people like this before. I mentioned once to someone. You know when you are so angry you could literally kill em. They responded no never. no one should. Im like. Im talking for a brief second you are seeing red. still they deny. I just dropped it but like would not trust anything coming from that person to be truth.
That’s not a threat, it’s a public comic. I’m not judging anyone, but you have to look at it from the POV of law enforcement. If they saw a comment like this and did nothing, and something actually happened, they’d be absolutely crucified for “ignoring red flags”.
I think the thing here is why are they being contacted about a private message. If anything only those party to it should possibly report it. It stands as it does as a cautionary tale about using any service like this because private conversations should not be looked at in a public announcement kind of way.
I think the thing here is why are they being contacted about a private message
Because WhatsApp scans messages for when “imminent harm exists”.
If anything only those party to it should possibly report it
That’s not how Snapchat works.
It stands as it does as a cautionary tale about using any service like this
Absolutely.
because private conversations should not be looked at in a public announcement kind of way
It wasn’t a “public announcement”, it was forwarded to law enforcement.
yeah by someone who should have never been privy to the convo. I meant that snapchat is treating it like its public discourse.
Did we just move the goalposts from ‘nobody can make jokes like this’ to ‘police have to investigate since they got a report’?
We didn’t move anything, the statement I made was that they get no sympathy from me.
The implication there of course being that she’s in the wrong, hence why she doesn’t deserve any sympathy for having her life destroyed over a dark joke.
Okay now I get it, at first I thought you were being serious but then I realized you were joking with the law enforcement getting crucified comment. You’d have to be literally brain dead to think something that stupid.
Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but he isn’t. Joking, that is.
Yeah I was being sarcastic haha. I’ve gotten into arguments with this guy before, one of the densest people on lemmy without a doubt.
You dont know any teachers do you?
Of course I do.
Not the people that taught you, i mean friends as an adult.
Does any adult really not know any teachers?
Apparently not you, cause i guarantee that every teacher with experience has had at least one student that turned their humor dark.
yes
