"The specter of student violence is pushing school
leaders across the country to turn their campuses into surveillance
testing grounds on the hope it’ll help them detect dangerous people
they’d otherwise miss. The supporters and designers of Avigilon, the AI
service bought for $1 billion last year by tech giant Motorola
Solutions, say its security algorithms could spot risky behavior with
superhuman speed and precision, potentially preventing another attack.
But
the advanced monitoring technologies ensure that the daily lives of
American schoolchildren are subjected to close scrutiny from systems
that will automatically flag certain students as suspicious, potentially
spurring a response from security or police forces, based on the work
of algorithms that are hidden from public view.
The
camera software has no proven track record for preventing school
violence, some technology and civil liberties experts argue. And the
testing of their algorithms for bias and accuracy — how confident the
systems are in identifying possible threats — has largely been conducted
by the companies themselves."
