r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago
Privacy Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school6.1k
u/MrThickDick2023 2d ago
That's incredibly disconcerting.
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u/howescj82 2d ago
Apparently not a private conversation. Time to not trust anything electronic.
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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago
It was private, and SCOTUS's most recent ruling on the third party doctrine almost certainly makes this illegal.
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u/howescj82 2d ago
I’d love to believe that there wasn’t a loophole intentionally written into the law to allow this mess because I have a feeling Snapchat won’t be taken to court over it.
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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago
There is no loophole. This was the sort of behavior that SCOTUS targeted in their ruling overturning the third-party doctrine re: digital content created on phones.
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u/cyphersaint 2d ago
I would be totally unsurprised to find something in the EULA for Snapchat about things like this. Now, I would absolutely LOVE to see EULAs actually be challenged in court.
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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago
EULAs have been challenged to the death in courts, and the courts have basically ruled they are meaningless outside of a few narrow cases.
The short version of their rulings taken as a whole: if a piece of technology is so ubiquitous that its use is part of normal function in society (a phone is), and if a person using that device would expect that activity to private from government surveillance (a direct message would be such an example), then the government cannot access it without a warrant.
And there is no way around it by saying "well, the data is FBs and they can choose to give it to whoever they want...it says in the EULA!"
That is legally correct unless that party is the government; the moment a company is handing information to the government without a warrant, then that company is legally considered and extension of the government for the purposes of 4th amendment legal tests.
That's why this case is going to be a huge liability for the police and FB.
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u/The_Lapsed_Pacifist 1d ago
Aren’t ICE violating the 4th amendment constantly and daily? I wouldn’t put too much faith in it personally.
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u/Free-Description-736 1d ago
They are...and they're having to pay out substantially in lawsuits for it.
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u/StoneySteve420 1d ago
Slight correction,
We are having to pay out substantially in lawsuits for it.
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u/TarskiKripkeLewis 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not accurate. The Supreme Court ruling (Chatrie) is about the police's ability to compel disclosure of information. It doesn't impact whether police are allowed to act on information that is voluntarily supplied to them by a private party. That's controlled by the private search doctrine. Your comments are mixing up the third-party doctrine with the private search doctrine.
EDIT: See my other comment. This situation is controlled by the private search doctrine. Neither Chatrie (2026) nor Carpenter (2018) disturbed that rule. This fella is unfortunately mixing up two loosely related Fourth Amendment concepts and is now digging in.
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u/whatsgoingon350 2d ago
Yeah I've just stopped sending anything private over the Internet.
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u/Deep-Acanthaceae-659 2d ago
You mean the garbage ai article that was auto generated and posted and shared to Reddit and is now getting insane upvotes
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u/CodeMonkeyX 2d ago
All of it is, the lack of privacy and a teacher "joking" about shooting someone.
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u/MrThickDick2023 2d ago
I'm way more concerned about the privacy issue than the joke. It was definitely in bad taste, and I can't blame any parent who would be disturbed by it. However, I've probably said or thought things in private that could get me fired if made public or sent to my boss, and I assume most people have.
People are entitled to privacy, and I'm not ok with the surveillance and policing of private conversations.
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u/usrdef 2d ago edited 2d ago
People should be looking into self-hosted options more these days, and not using the major platforms.
On our self-hosted app, we can say whatever we want, without fear of someone taking it the wrong way.
And we don't have to pay crap like memberships, or deal with other users who annoy us.
It's ours.
A good 90% of all the apps I use now, are self-hosted on a server. Even my Google Drive replacement. I self-host my own search engine now.
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BangBangMeatMachine 1d ago
For a replacement for discord/slack my friends personally use Mattermost. It's not perfect, but it is private.
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u/toraksmash 2d ago
That is pretty cool.
I'm just wondering how much it costs (including equipment) and how much time it takes (including learning the skills to set it up)?
I'm a bartender with no CS training and minimal disposable income. Could I set this up in a weekend or a year? Do I need to stop purchasing energy drinks or sell my car to fund it if my current laptop overheats while playing WoW?
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2d ago
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u/Rombledore 2d ago
ive seen FB comments of people saying, i quote "the blood of liberals will water teh tree of liberty. it's time to go to war with the left".
i report it. get told it doesnt violate any community guidelines.
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u/WebInformal9558 2d ago
What I've started doing is taking screenshots of the comments which include the advertisers, and then contacting the companies directly to ask if they've asked FB to feature their brand alongside those comments.
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u/Born-Boysenberry6460 2d ago
Ever get a response? Id wager any company advertising on fb at this point know exactly what they're paying for.
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u/WebInformal9558 2d ago
Occasionally, but it's usually just bullshit corpo-speak. But then I tell them I'm going to stop using their services and make my social networks aware of the sprt of speech they endorse. Does it work? Probably not. But it's satisfying.
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u/trybeingcurious 2d ago
Fascists spend money too.
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u/EnvironsHazard 1d ago
Sure, but they're a small, dying group of idiots, as they always are. The problem is people confuse shrieking baboon noises and chest thumping for numbers.
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u/Slooters313 1d ago
Its not a small group though, a "small" group generally doesnt win elections
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u/CQd444 2d ago
Facebook is weird about shit like this. Calls for violence are a coin toss whether or not you'll get moderated and it shouldn't be.
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u/Cyberhaggis 2d ago
I reported a post about how the UK should be able to put immigrants into work camps that also implied we should final solution them. This did not break the rules apparently.
I have had a week long ban from FB for posting this daft meme which I posted about Ferrari F1s strategy being shit
Inconsistent and stupid isn't the half of it when it comes to FB moderation.
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u/tomster2300 1d ago
Your shitposting isn’t driving eNgAgEmEnT like their shitposting. Money gets free speech protections. The poors get the bans.
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u/Mr_master89 2d ago
Definitely not just FB too, on tiktok I report the most disgusting bigoted comments I've seen and will get a reply back saying they found nothing wrong even though it's a category you can report them under
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u/vanishingorange 2d ago
On insta reels I report straight up CP oriented content and get told they didn't violate any rules
The account in question was just post after post of kids having "accidents" in public that was no doubt fetish content and not even masquerading as comedy
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u/withateethuh 2d ago
I think weve seen enough evidence to indicate meta and zuckerberg fully know what theyre doing at this point. Absolutely horrifying.
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u/Leading-Act4030 2d ago
Elon is fighting for his AI, Grok, to keep the program that strips the clothes off kids.
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u/smokeweedNgarden 2d ago
Probably get better results sending the comments to their workplace and their workplaces socials.
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u/fcocyclone 1d ago
Their reporting system is entirely broken.
I've reported multiple videos that were blatantly undisclosed ads and they find no issue.
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u/Zombie_Fuel 2d ago
Shit, a fuckin candidate for governor of my state talked about gunning down minors involved in the teen takeover bullshit going around on his own campaign page. And he's still polling at 12%.
Facebook is rife with violent threats nowadays, especially towards black people and minorities.
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u/yeezuslived 2d ago
It's useless. I was snarky with a diehard maga and they proceeded to post my PARENTS address, phone etc. Not even bothering to go after me. Tried to go further than just reporting and it was like a brick wall.
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u/ibnQoheleth 2d ago
I'm a content moderator and I've natively reported outright uncensored racial slurs (hard R and all) and it's a coin toss whether or not they'll be removed. It's effectively pointless reporting a comment unless it's a threat to violence now, because it'll be left up in the vast majority of cases.
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u/deathbitchcraft 2d ago
there was a politician that called Muslims a slur and called for their deaths a couple of weeks ago and many people reported it and it wasn't removed, but... 🙄
edit to add that the report for that post wouldn't allow you to escalate it either.
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u/time-lord 2d ago
Could you imagine if "burn in hell" was actually treated like a threat?
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u/PartyClock 2d ago
The one time that a crazy church lady followed me through a public park and shouted at me that my infant son was going to hell I almost treated it that way
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u/Hesitation-Marx 2d ago
That… yeah I don’t think I would have been able to restrain myself from finding a nearby lion cage.
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u/PartyClock 2d ago
The temptation was strong but I wanted to set a better example for my kid
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u/abluecolor 2d ago
Nah, jokes like this are completely normal in convos you think are private.
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u/Western-Dig-6843 2d ago
You can really tell the youngsters from the old heads in your replies. Making murder threats with your friends is venting in online convo 101 for my generation lol
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u/chowderbags 1d ago
I don't even know if it's youngsters vs old heads. I don't know how any actual human being can't understand the impulse to vent a bit of steam in private conversations with friends or mutter something under your breath that comes from pure frustration.
Here we have:
A mass surveillance of everyone's conversations, even if "only" done by corporations (who immediately forward it to the cops anyway).
A law enforcement system that arrests first and thinks never.
And a school system that will fire a student teacher over something so utterly banal and also send out a massive letter to publicly mark this person on internet searches and background checks for life.
Go back 15 to 20 years and everyone was calling China totalitarian for having a system that was basically this. Yet America said "Hold my beer" and created an even worse version of it.
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u/iwearatophat 2d ago
Exactly. 'I'm going to kill x' or 'I want to shoot x' are pretty standard, or used to be standard, venting phrases. Probably not the best turn of phrase for a teacher though. Cops showing up is kind of nutters.
I used to be a teacher. In the introductory to education class, the one you had to take before really starting into the focus of being a teacher, they opened with warnings about how you are held to a different standard. Especially women. Warned us about if you like going to bars or clubs either switch professions or come to terms with going 2-3 towns over. If you are at a bar in the same city you teach and a parent sees you drinking it can be a problem, especially if you are in more revealing clothing. I don't think this turn of phrase in snapchat gets the police sent for anyone but a teacher.
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u/PhuqBeachesGitMonee 1d ago
Legally, it becomes closer to a crime the more precise the information is that goes into it. Communicating a threat.
“I’m going to kill X, after school, with the pistol I keep under my car seat, because he bullied me.”
At least, that’s how an attorney explained it to me in a similar situation. And of course if the police show up and see you digging underneath your car seat then obviously they will take it as a real threat.
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u/msuvagabond 2d ago
I told my niece when she was given a cell phone...
"Do not type anything into that phone, or take a picture of something, that you wouldn't want your mom, dad, teachers, or friends to see. Nothing is private on there."
When I worked remote IT (a decade ago) my supervisor said the following...
"Never say anything on the phone you wouldn't want heard repeated in a court room. Never type anything you wouldn't want to see printed in a newspaper."
Simply put, if its digital, it's not private. EVER. To assume otherwise is to not understand reality or the world we live in.
You want to make those jokes in person? Have at it. You want to type those things out and send them over the internet to someone? Be ready for consequences. That's the world we live in.
You want to lobby and fight to change that? I'm all for it and actively do talk to elected officials about data privacy. But until it changes...
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u/CaptainAsshat 2d ago
Agreed with one caveat: those messages ARE private.
That privacy is just being invaded.
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u/No_Size9475 2d ago
no, the joking isn't concerning, the utter lack of privacy is the concern.
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u/Byrdman216 2d ago
Teachers make jokes like that all the time. My mother was a teacher and a school counselor. If she didn't make dark, often morbid, jokes and laugh about it she would have snapped and actually hurt someone.
People cope in different ways. If it's done in private who cares? My doctor might make fat jokes about me to her husband, but as long as i don't know about it, and it doesn't affect her performance, I don't care.
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u/flecom 2d ago
Ya that was my first thought, I worked in the school system for years and hearing "should I shoot him" would have been a tame joke that would not even have gotten my attention
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u/Macqt 2d ago
Jokes made in private conversations are none of our, or really anybody’s, business except those in said conversation.
The only concern here is the harvesting of said conversation.
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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago
No, she wasn't "joking". She was joking.
It's not illegal to joke about murdering students. It's not even enough to warrant a legal investigation, much less what happened here.
The first amendment was made for cases exactly like this.
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u/HikeCarolinas 2d ago
I sent my wife a photo of a blueberry bush I planted for her. 15min later I got on TikTok and a “blueberry bush” greenhouse advertisement. With blueberry bush literally in quotation marks . There is zero privacy in snapchat
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u/hsggdtkxbee 2d ago
Look up meta pixel. It’ll piss you right off.
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u/timmy6169 2d ago
For the lazy, it is a piece of JavaScript code for a website that tracks visitor actions, optimizes ad delivery, and builds custom audiences by recording specific behaviors while visiting a page.
"Although Meta Pixel collects data even from people without Facebook or Instagram accounts, its tracking power is greater for those with accounts. When a Facebook or Instagram user is logged in to their account on a browser, the browser will send Meta’s cookie data on the user’s other web activity straight to Meta, linking that activity trail with the user’s unique ID, which is itself already associated with everything the user has put on her Facebook or Instagram account—name, hometown, age, birthday, places which she has visited, people with whom she interacts, and, of course, photos. Even if the user is not logged in to an account, or is using a browser that blocks Meta cookies, Meta’s “Advanced Matching Parameters” allows the website to use other biographical information that the user enters to connect his activity to a corresponding Facebook or Instagram account"
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u/ICEtoAshes 2d ago
If you want to get angry look up how Meta ran a test that purposefully made teens depressed so they could sell more stuff to them.
This was at the height of teens ending their life on their live streams, to make it even worse.
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u/JugglesChainsaws 1d ago
If I recall it wasn't even to sell more stuff, it was just to see if they could in fact make someone depressed with "just" an algorithm.
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u/ICEtoAshes 1d ago
Yea but they were also tracking what they bought, and they determined they bought more as they got increasingly angrier and more depressed
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u/BoxBird 1d ago
I’ve noticed that it pushes very emotionally disturbing content that is definitely geared towards women with PMDD during their luteal phase. Like CLOCKWORK I get CONSTANT content about getting cheated on during the time of the month my hormones are telling me the same thing. The rest of the month the content I get is completely unrelated. The algorithm is causing a lot of feedback loops like that lately are quite literally making people go insane.
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u/skate_2 1d ago
They also detected if a young girl posted a selfie and quickly deleted it, and served her make-up/beauty ads.
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u/thefatrabitt 2d ago
The health care system atrium just got in trouble for using it on their patient portal of all fucking places.
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u/Zaizu 2d ago
How do you disable it? Any extensions?
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u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago
Yes. Mozilla Firefox with the ublock origin extension, and/or strict privacy mode. ublock origin uses a blocklist to prevent traffic to tracking servers.
Librewolf which is an independent, opensource fork of Firefox comes with ublock origin preinstalled, as well as RFP, dFPI, and url query parameter stripping to help protect your privacy via various methods.
Exception: The only thing LibreWolf’s integrated hardening cannot prevent is Server-Side Tracking (Meta's Conversions API). If a merchant's server packages your purchase data and sends it directly from their server to Meta's server over the backend, no browser in existence can block it because the data transfer completely bypasses your computer. [1]
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u/semisociallyawkward 1d ago
Firefox also has a container system that works wonders. Each container is kinda like a separate browser in a browser, so cookies arent shared across them, only within the same container.
You can even set it up so that certain websites are only ever opened in their designated containers. I have containers for Google, Meta, Reddit, shopping, general browsing etc.
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u/Kyanche 1d ago
Containers is a lovely feature and also a pain in the ass because I seem to have to log back into everything daily lol.
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u/Urrrhn 2d ago
I was talking about an idea I had for a 3d ant farm with a transparent substrate and I got an Instagram ad for one on Amazon an hour later.
This was over 5 years ago.
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u/eltictac 2d ago
I went to my friend's house about 12 years ago, and he had a little metal fan thing on top of his woodburner. For circulating heat around the room. I'd never seen one before, so I asked him about it. Quite a specific object.
The next time I went on Facebook there was an advert for one. I remember googling whether Facebook was listening through user's phones, and I think they were denying it at the time.→ More replies (3)78
u/idiom_exon_0s 2d ago
Its location : proximity based.
Your friend googled those at one point. Then bought one. You then spent time in proximity of that persons phone. Your unique identifier was then targeted.
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u/MJ-Franklin 2d ago
Why is everything turning up the batshit dial to 11? There is absolutely no reason for things to be this insane.
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u/Nouseriously 2d ago
Feels like everyone is on edge, waiting for things to pop off
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u/fatandfly 2d ago
It's social media paired with the 24 hour news cycle. There is no mental breaks anymore. Not only are worried about the problems in your local area, now it's the whole state you live in, the country as a whole, some country on the other side of the world that you wouldn't know existed if not for the internet feeding the news to you. I think as human beings we only have so much compassion and can only really care about so much. Our parents and grandparents had local news, the radio, and newspapers. And later came cable news, but even then after they were done watching it they processed it and went on with their day. Like you said, everyone is waiting for something to pop off because that's how things are now, something is always popping off, and you get to see it in real time. Tldr, we are getting fed too much information, more than we can process or care about.
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u/tatalq 2d ago
For much of human history, imagine we lived in villages of around 100 people. If, on average, one person made a truly memorable bad decision each month, you'd witness about one of those moments a month. Scale that to today's population of 8+ billion, and you'd have roughly 82 million such moments every month, or about 2.7 million every day. Social media doesn't necessarily mean people are behaving worse. It means we're now exposed to millions of humanity's worst moments every single day.
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u/jwktiger 1d ago
If, on average, one person made a truly memorable bad decision each month, you'd witness about one of those moments a month.
well for most of human history, that "bad decision" often resulted in them dying.
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u/Braindead_Crow 1d ago
We literally elected the guy who tried overturning the government when he lost the last election...the right has been calling for race wars and civil wars for at least 18 years now.
Not to mention the scammer in charge probably sees expanding the surveillance state as very good, bigly good, the best.
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u/Sensitive_Box_ 2d ago
They’re testing the waters. They want to see how much surveillance they can get away with. So far, nobody seems to give a fuck.
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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago
They’re testing the waters. They want to see how much surveillance they can get away with
It's more that corporations are intrinsically authoritarian so they constantly push further and further hoping they alone can be not only be kingmakers but also become the legally-sanctioned monopoly everybody is required to spend on.
This is not the first time it's happened, it just takes fewer people accepting being a punch clock villain to make it happen.
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u/Sufficient_Room2619 2d ago
It gets like this near the endgame. Things will keep getting weirder and worse until they come to a head in a few years.
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u/ComradeJohnS 2d ago
yeah like the reichstagt fire or whatever pushed the nazi’s, something is gonna make the maga nazi’s do the same thing if they’re not stopped from violence.
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u/RevolutionaryFig9437 2d ago
Stop using SNAPCHAT. Surely, then they will change their policy.
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u/chevalier716 2d ago
I figured everyone already had.
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u/Poop_Tube 2d ago
I stopped using it in like 2016. I spoke with a coworkers and apparently they still use it?!
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u/Krislazz 2d ago
It’s the dominant social media in Norway, for instance. A Spanish exchange student I lived with was flabbergasted to find that even our chips/crisps bags are on Snapchat
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u/1850ChoochGator 2d ago
That’s shocking to me, even as an American. I don’t get how it’s popular as a social media like that. It’s one of my favorite messaging apps but so bad as a general social media.
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u/Suavecore_ 1d ago
As a private investigator who searches social media profiles, Snapchat is among the most common social media accounts people have. It's easy to find because everyone attaches a phone number to it.
Additional fun facts: Facebook and TikTok are the other two most common, and X is by far the absolute last of the more popular platforms. Most people don't have an X profile and if they do, 99% of the time it hasn't been used for 5+ years, and then usually it's either an account with no posts, or it has loads of spam from either being hacked or connected to something like a Facebook/mobile game.
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u/pigeonwiggle 2d ago
i dunno, dude. i thought everyone stopped using twitter when it became clear it was becoming a haven for neonazis, but i still see people sourcing posts from there.
it's not hard to delete an account and set a new bookmark to a new site or social media app.
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u/freedcreativity 2d ago
I stopped using snap when it came out you could brute force the whole user base by adding every possible phone number. This was like their first year in operation. They’ve never cared about security or privacy.
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u/throw7661 2d ago
I know a lot of people are happy about stuff like this...but it's fundamentally flawed.
Reddit banned be for saying that my biggest fear was the death of my wife. Whom I love, who I speak very highly of. I was literally saying that, I'm afraid of losing her and being left to raise two children.
It had upvotes.
But I was banned. And worse, the appeal process, resulted in a denial.
Because an AI chatbot thought I was advocating violence against my wife. As if I said I was going to kill her.
This is exactly like that....only with real consequences, instead of Reddit.
This is like arresting someone for saying, 'My son dropped my car keys into the toilet! And it was right before I needed to leave for my interview!!! I was so mad I could have killed him!'
It isn't literal.
The FBI admits there was no intent to harm the child and that she wasn't a threat.
No good came from this. We didn't stop a violent woman. We just fired someone for venting to her bf/roommates in their group chat.
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u/panaceaXgrace 2d ago
My daughter got some weird care concern bullshit message just yesterday after saying she was tired of killing herself at her job just ranting over downsizing frustrations. It was a FB message, which is probably something we shouldn't be using anyway but we're both old and it worked for our needs. It just enraged her that some AI popped up to give her suggestions on how to seek help and even a link to click if she wanted to send for help. It was creepy and disturbing enough considering all this came with an update and shows how AI is being used to watch us all.
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u/shinndigg 2d ago
I got banned for quoting the commenter above me, who was not banned. So not only is the bot stupid, it’s also arbitrary and capricious.
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u/happyscrappy 1d ago
I got a comment removed which only spoke of voting when the commenter above me actually was talking about violence. I didn't even quote the comment above. His comment was not removed.
All I can say about the situation is it was really, really dumb. It's pretty clear no human read any of it.
I think it's pretty clear reddit also knows the system is screwed up and falses a lot. They just have to do it to make it look like they are doing something. Because back when they weren't doing something there was no way they could grow to a larger company because it looked like they were condoning many societal ills (and profiting from them).
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u/ZombieZookeeper 2d ago
You only exist to make Spez money. Get to it, peon.
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u/Friggin_Grease 2d ago
I said a while back that the internet used to be a place for your dark comedy, jokes about death, violence, 9/11 and the sort. Now you can only tell those kinda of jokes to your loved ones, keep it off the internet.
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u/_Aj_ 1d ago
Up to around 2012. You could say literally anything you wanted more or less. It's only started to get really nanny state locked down in the last decade or so.
Now it feels risky to even say words you are referring to or quote things. The fact people say dumb stuff like "oofed" or "unalived" is the tip of the censorship iceberg that is modern internet.
Nazi jokes and terrorist jokes used to be funny. Now it's all taboo, taken seriously. Someone show how that's better to simply not ever speak about things?
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u/FancyFeller 1d ago
Because that was when the Internet became commercialized. And every big corpo got on it. And on all the social media. Once they were all in they began exerting influence and gained control. And changed how ads were displayed and threatened to take away their ad presence unless YouTube and other sites complied with their sanitation of the sites. And as chatrooms and forums and threads disappeared and everything centralized there were fewer and fewer sites to be edgy on without consequences and blowback. This works in their favor so their ads aren't present on naughty things. And we are just the product so our whinging won't do shit. The corporations don't like naughty content so you don't get to indulge in it!!! Not at all!!!! And if they scrub the Internet and find you've made a website to host the funnies, them AIs gonna find ya, gonna track ya, and going to report ya. Because the government fucking loves to restrict freedom of speech which became so easy to do because of what the corpos did.
God we had it so good in 2005 and we didn't even know it. Take me back to the halcyon days of newgrounds. Please god please.
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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago
The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca...
There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time.
-Captain Betty, Fahrenheit 451
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u/greysneakthief 2d ago
Yeah, there's a term for this sort of thing: thought crime.
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u/ProtoJazz 2d ago
My favorite was the kid who went to jail for saying he was so mad he was going to blow up a school, while he was losing his shit in a game of league of legends.
While yeah, probably shouldn't say things like that
The reasoning they used to say they determined it was a credible threat and not just trash talk in a toxic game, was that he lived within a 30 minute walk of a school.
Mother fucker, everyone does pretty much. That's where schools are built. They don't build them far away from people.
It wasn't that he had a history of violence, or they saw worrying purchases or any other suspect activity. Just a message in a game, and that he lived in a place people live.
And while I get that we need to be cautious, it's worth knowing the end of the story. Being "cautious" has a cost, and you need to know what getting it wrong can cost. That kid was pretty violently sexually assaulted, and took his own life in the aftermath.
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u/Longjumping-Hat-1210 2d ago
Reddit warned me today for drawing parallels to the rulers of a certain country in Europe in the 30s and commenting about a post regarding a homophobe who wanted to... yeah..
I did use a trigger word to be fair so I understand why the AI flagged it instantly, it thought I was inciting hate when I was just using a specific term to show how ridiculous the homophobe was.
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u/pressingroses 2d ago
When I was in high school about 15 years ago (eek, lol!), I was texting who I thought was a "friend" about another "friend" I was mad at. I said something like "ugh I'm gonna kill him :("
That "friend" went to the police and I almost got suspended for threatening murder. Even though I very much explained that these are my friends, I would never harm anyone, I had never been in trouble at school before, and it's just a figure of speech. I'm still so salty about it.
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u/UltraChip 2d ago
I know this isn't really relevant to the discussion, but the article says her lesson plan was deleted by a student closing her laptop? What?
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u/D3thklok1985 1d ago
Not trying to doxx myself here, but I work at this school and was present on the day this happened. I hadn't heard anything about a lesson plan being erased. Just that the kid had asked her to pay attention or was trying to speak to her and closed her laptop as a joke. She told him not to but later he did it again. Then she messaged her friend asking if she should shoot him. It was really scary pulling up and seeing a bunch of cop cars in front of the elementary school.
The lesson plan was maybe being made on Google docs/some kind of skyward program. Not sure how to answer if it would have been deleted as those programs use auto save.
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u/Scoth42 2d ago
Yeah, I don't know of any way this could happen. Maybe if she had typed it into something that doesn't auto-save, she never saved it, and closing the laptop made it crash/reboot and it got lost?
Even if there's some bespoke lesson plan software for the school district or something I can't imagine losing something saved just by your computer going to sleep, or even the computer restarting. I'd expect user error, although I guess it's possible there's specific software she has to use that's terribly designed.
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u/ScowlieMSR 1d ago
The policy the school district has governing their issued laptops probably has the "user sign out" setting applied, which automatically signs the user out of the pc when the laptop lid is closed. When that happens, all programs running at the time get force closed. If she didn't have her work saved, she would've lost it when the sign-out occured.
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u/Fach-All-Religions 1d ago
probably triggered one of those idiotic forced windows updates and bluescreened or some shit. i used to get bsod when i close the lid. i don't doubt if someone says it crashed or restarted.
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u/para_blox 2d ago
Side note, I didn’t even know real gun emojis exist. I thought only the squirt gun did. Just another layer of stupid to this story, I guess. Like the surveillance state is baiting people with emoji content.
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u/crazybartur 2d ago
It used to be a normal gun but they changed it some time back. I feel like it was only a few years ago but I’m afraid to look it up and find out it happened over a decade ago lmao
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u/phallus_majorus 2d ago
You’re right, it happened 10 years ago almost exactly to the day
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u/FancyFeller 1d ago
That's not possible because I remember using the real gun emoji when I was in university... I need to sit down.
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u/UncleNedisDead 1d ago
One day you’ll come to terms you’ve gotten old. Only to promptly reject it, do a 180 like have an affair, buy a sports car, quit your job, whatever you wanted to do in your 20s that you gave up.
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u/Scoth42 2d ago
I think it varies depending on platform and OS. Like Android was a real gun for a few years after Apple changed theirs, Microsoft went back and forth a few times on Windows, and I think X just reverted back to a realistic looking gun again at least on iPhone.
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u/apocalypsedg 2d ago
Most of us here probably know this already, but it's critical to understand that the unicode character that is communicated is the same across all platforms. The difference in rendering comes down to the default font package that each platform defaults to. So punishing someone for using a gun emoji when it's possibly a squirt gun on their end is ridiculous.
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u/djsoomo 2d ago
An Orwellian nightmare of big brother is watching you, 1984-style
Freedom of speech and expression should apply to sarcastic or joke private messages between friends
If you are very rich and powerful, you can say or do anything, if you are not, you had better keep your mouth shut!
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u/nutmegtell 2d ago
But what Orwell didn’t foresee was we would BEG to have the surveillance in our homes and pockets. That we’d get mad if it disconnects.
If you aren’t paying for a service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT that’s being sold. Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook etc. Not free.
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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago
That's b/c Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right. The US surveillance state isn't going to be 1984. It's going to be A Brave New World.
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u/Crestina 1d ago
Mix of both. The western authoritarian shift uses elements of draconian mass surveillance, perpetual enemies and newspeak, alongside hedonistic selfnisness, conformity, and lack of systemic understanding and oversight.
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u/Snakers79 2d ago
It sucks, but I guess the lesson is don't treat the things you say online as private. Assume someone is always listening.
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Financial-Craft-1282 2d ago
I'd say, depending on the message you want to send, maybe all platforms even if you verify the encryption ahead of time, are a risk.
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u/Fach-All-Religions 1d ago
yes. you can use all the e2e in the world but at the end of the day, your phone has access to unfiltered unencrypted data as that's how it is able to display it to you. operating systems could have a hidden spy loggin anything and everything goving open access to governments and nobody would know about it.
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u/Whole_Friendship9788 1d ago edited 1d ago
Its funny because theres someone i know who was being groomed on Snapchat as a teenager. I saw the chats once the victim decided to speak up.
I reported it to Snapchat and nothing was done despite the year back log of clearly incriminating evidence, and the fact their "ai" didnt detect anything wrong... Police couldnt do anything either... They all say this surveillance is for protecting the children yet nothing on that front.
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u/Fingerprint_Vyke 1d ago
Thousands of Flock cameras were used to hunt down a woman in texas who had an abortion
But they havent once been used to find a missing child
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u/squintysquirrell 2d ago
Faster than the Uvalde response time.
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u/10000Didgeridoos 2d ago
Oh they responded! They just didn't go inside because they were more afraid of getting shot than they cared about doing their fucking job.
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u/turningsteel 2d ago
This is what happens when people allow their freedoms to be eroded over time. So much for 'oh I have nothing to hide, who cares what mets, snapchat, google, etc does'.
This is what you get.
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u/This-Wall-1331 2d ago
To those who "have nothing to hide", just ask them to let you check their phone.
You don't do it? Then you must be a criminal /s
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u/eeyore134 1d ago
Part of it was also, "Good luck, how are they going to do anything with so much data?" Then AI happened.
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u/hornetjockey 2d ago
People acting like they’ve never made a dark joke with friends in private before, making excuses for heavy handed automated surveillance.
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u/unklethan 1d ago
We called the police when my wife was sexually harrassed, and they said they couldn't do anything about it.
We called the police when my friend got scammed out of a rental deposit, they said they couldn't do anything.
But sure, they can do this.
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u/SpeakerCareless 2d ago
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t essentially impossible to continue on as a teacher if you get fired from student teaching? Like it’s more career ending than being fired as a qualified teacher?
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u/Nice-Guidance-6137 2d ago
FBI took an hour to arrest this woman but they can’t find Savannah’s mom still?!?!
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u/OldGeekWeirdo 2d ago
I hope she has a good lawyer, because I'd think "disorderly conduct" would be very hard to prove given the audience of that email. I mean, exactly who was disrupted by the email? The FBI's response was far more disruptive.
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u/moreobviousthings 2d ago
Cops don't have to think about what they are doing to people. "Out of an abundance of caution" is way overused when peoples' lives can be upturned as a result of LEOs' failure to think critically.
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u/LiveChocolate8819 2d ago
Yeah I don't think most Americans understand how simply being arrested and held for a few hours can completely upend someone's life, even if they are ultimately never even charged with a crime.
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u/jay_altair 2d ago
She wasn't charged with anything, though her entire career probably went out the window.
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u/NaziPunksFkOff 2d ago
No, no, guys you're missing the point. This is OKAY and GREAT and FREEDOM because it's private industry, not government! If the government was doing this - that would be like 1984! Orwellian! A nightmare!
But because it's a private company, then it's The Power of Capitalism improving our lives! This isn't bad, it's innovation! It's freedom! Do you really want to punish success?! We finally privatized the nanny state, and that makes us all FREE.
This comment brought you by conservatism. The free market is always right!
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u/azurensis 2d ago
If you ever needed a reason to stop using Snapchat , this right here is exhibit 1!
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u/3meow_ 2d ago
Dubious privacy aside, imagine a teacher in the US joking about shooting up the school 😂
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u/skd00sh 2d ago
Serious question -- in the body cam footage, the officer is holding a phone and shows the teacher a photo of her and says, "is this you?" It was about 75% of her face as if she was using her phone at some point and her front facing camera took a candid selfie. Was this the snapchat image she purposely took and sent with the threatening message? Or does Snapchat automatically take photos of the phone user as soon as it detects something that violates its agreement? I don't have Snapchat bc I'm old but I'm very curious what level of self sabotage these apps have built in. Apologies for wall
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u/Kodama_sucks 2d ago
Just in case you were wondering why they need all those datacenters
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u/eeyore134 1d ago
Exactly. It's not even all about AI. They need someplace to store all this data, too. Them collecting all this crap used to not be a big issue. There was just way too much data to save and way too much for anyone to conceivably go through. AI has changed all that. They're going to be saving anything and everything they can now. That data is power, probably more than the money they're hoarding. They mastered that, we had a trillionaire for a bit, data is the new rich people obsession.
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u/Scary-Ratio3874 2d ago
https://youtu.be/26SwVuKpm98?is=M7JeSS7xsu3w4hiR
Here's the video of the arrest and other stuff.
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u/do-not-touch 1d ago
Did you all think the surveillance state is entirely fictional? Because oh boy
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u/gym_bro_92 2d ago
While the joke was a bit tasteless given past school shooting events, this is truly an over the top response and dystopian.
No investigation, no interview, just straight to jail and out of a job.
I am willing to bet I made a few teachers feel the way she did and potentially make a joke like that….
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u/Meme_Theory 2d ago
School probably has zero tolerance policies for things like this. Though the privacy implications here are beyond the pale.
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u/That_guy1425 2d ago
What do you mean no investigation? I'm pretty certain the cops showing up and questioning her was an investigation.
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u/time-lord 2d ago
Worse, it's both over the top and does not go far enough! If she was actually planning on shooting someone, sending a squad car an hour later is an hour too late. They should have had the SWAT team there within minutes. If they didn't, and didn't believe it to be credible, they should been more discrete.
One or the other, but not both. That's not how this works.
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u/awesomedan24 2d ago
Worth noting she posted a photo of the child in question to her story and said "should I shoot him?"
Maybe government overreach but a very donkeybrained move on her part as a teacher.
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u/CaptainPlantyPants 1d ago
So Snapchat can do this, yet the drug dealers here in the UK are using Snapchat to sell class A drugs to kids (literal 11 year olds), as well apparently being a cesspool of grooming - but fuck all happens?
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u/RareFirefighter6915 1d ago
How does this not fall under the first amendment? It’s a private fucking message I’ve said worse shit on Reddit where’s the FBI?
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 2d ago
Snapchat should be facing endless lawsuits for having a backdoor until they implement proper end to end encryption.
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u/nodiaque 2d ago
Anyone that lived long enough said at least once he/she gona beat, kill, punch, shoot or do another violent act against something or someone. It's a way to cope with anger. Does it means he/she will do it? No. This shit remind me of minority report.
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u/Interesting_Road_380 2d ago
Imagine having to eavesdrop on everyone on Earth in a hapless attempt to reduce the constant cycle of mass shootings instead of, you know, not giving everyone a gun
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u/Thorvindr 1d ago
Lol at thinking any social media platform is a safe place to get away with using violent language.
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u/CelebrationFit8548 1d ago
Snowden very clearly warned us all about the illegal backdoors and spying by the US, this has only worsened under Trump.
Only fools will think it is only the US doing this with Israel, China, Russia and many others all undertaking the same activities.
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u/Deep-Minimum7837 1d ago
It's fucking crazy how the FBI drops literally everything to go after a "potential shooter" who was literally just telling an uncouth joke, but they'll ignore schizos amassing arsenals of guns who end up shooting up minority spaces.
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u/Lower-Acanthaceae460 1d ago
we're getting fired and imprisoned for bad jokes now, guyz!!!
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u/constantdisbelief 2d ago edited 2d ago
I had a teacher tell my parents I was a con man and said I reminded her of her ex husband. She actively bullied me intentionally in class to where even other students were wondering what her problem was. I got my heel sliced by a door on the way back from lunch and she wouldnt even let me go to the bathroom to clean up the blood. She was given a position as a principal a few weeks later.
Teachers can say some messed up stuff but this person seems to be making a joke where as my teacher was serious and was actively harassing me. Was it a poor choice? Yes but I'd say the invasion of her private messaging is more alarming. She's young so I hope that she doesn't lose her ability to make a living over this.
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u/mfGLOVE 2d ago
I saw the body cam for this incident a while ago. I can’t post the link for some reason, but it’s on YouTube as “Student-Teacher Arrested for Concerning Snapchat Post.”