…the students at the Privacy Institute, which specialize in studying surveillance and reversing its harm, started removing the sensors, hacking into them, and working on an open source guide so other students could do the same. Luzzi had claimed the devices were secure and the data encrypted, but Privacy Institute students learned they were relatively insecure and unencrypted. “The students of this facility, including myself, the way that we get publications is that we take systems like this and we explore flaws in them. We explain what’s bad about them, why they don’t work, and so they could not have picked a group of students who were more suitable to figure out why their study was stupid.”

 

These rollouts are part of what Cory Doctrow calls the “shitty technology adoption curve” whereby horrible, unethical and immoral technologies are normalized and rationalized by being deployed on vulnerable populations for constantly shifting reasons. You start with people whose concerns can be ignored—migrants, prisoners, homeless populations—then scale it upwards—children in school, contractors, un-unionized workers. By the time it gets to people whose concerns and objections would be the loudest and most integral to its rejection, the technology has already been widely deployed

Ongweso, E. (2022, December 2). ‘NO’: Grad students analyze, hack, and remove under-desk surveillance devices designed to track them. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gwy3/no-grad-students-analyze-hack-and-remove-under-desk-surveillance-devices-designed-to-track-them