Thread by @doctorow

Faced with remote learning, educators had to figure out what to do about high-stakes testing: a pedagogically bankrupt adversarial practice of measuring students' educational outcomes by testing their performance in a circumstance that they will never face in the real world.

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It was an opportunity to rethink assessment and education. Instead, it was reinvented with the help of #DisciplinaryTechnology grifters from the "remote invigilation" industry, who peddled spyware that claimed to be able to fight cheating by taking over students' computers.

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In a crowded field of awful companies, one stands out as the worst: @proctorio, which uses digital phrenology to monitor students' faces while they take tests, setting them up for punishment for looking away while thinking, going to the bathroom, or throwing up from anxiety.

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Their products are designed to be used by teachers to capture a 360' view of the students' test-taking environment, which penalizes poor students who share a room with others who may be asleep, undressed, or just wanting their privacy.

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And woe betide the student who lives in a broadband desert and has to "attend school" from the parking lot of a local Taco Bell in order to get wifi, and who will therefore always flunk the test even before they start to write it.

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Now, if you live in America and you have inadequate housing and broadband, you're disproportionately likely to be Black or brown, and Proctorio's there for you, ready to make a bad situation far worse.

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Out of all the (terrible) facial recognition Proctorio could have used, it chose one of the worst, a notoriously "racist" algorithm so bad at parsing dark skin that children take their tests with ultra-bright lamps shining directly in their eyes.

vice.com/en/article/g5g…

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Proctorio has seen its profits surge during the pandemic, but it doesn't act like a company riding a triumphant wave - rather, it behaves like a company that knows that its good fortune could disappear in an instant if its practices and defects were widely known.

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How else to explain its conduct? Last summer, Protorio CEO Mike Olsen personally entered a Reddit forum to dox a CHILD who criticized his software:

pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bos…

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Not long after, the company filed a suite of meritless suits against @Linkletter, a Canadian educator who linked to the company's publicly accessible training videos as part of the debate about the use of the technology at his university.

pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/pro…

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In September, Proctorio attacked another student: @ejohnson99, a security and privacy researcher enrolled at Miami University.

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The company filed a bogus copyright claim to remove a thread Johnson posted, pointing out the contradictions between Proctorio's public statements and its products' actual functionality.

techcrunch.com/2020/11/05/pro…

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It was a highly detailed, cogent thread and it contained small excerpts of Proctorio source code to backstop the extremely damning critical claims it made.

These snippets are clearly fair use, but the company used a copyright claim in a bid to censor a(nother) critic.

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As it turns out, this is illegal. The DMCA - for all its failings - contains a clause prohibiting this kind of abuse. The clause hasn't gotten much of work out since the law was passed in 1998, but one organization has managed to make it stick, in a big way: @EFF.

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In 2018 EFF got justice for Stephanie Lenz, a mom whose video of her adorable dancing toddler was illegally censored by Universal Music Group.

In other words, EFF not only has managed to wield this underutilized part of the DMCA - they wielded it against a TITAN.

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Now, EFF has announced that it's fighting for Erik Johnson, filing suit in Arizona against Proctorio for engaging in copyright abuse to censor a critic.

eff.org/press/releases…

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"We’re asking the court for a declaratory judgment that there is no infringement to prevent further legal threats and takedown attempts against Johnson for using code excerpts and screenshots to support his comments." -EFF attorney @CaraGagliano

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"Software companies don’t get to abuse copyright law to undermine their critics. Using pieces code to explain your research or support critical commentary is no different from quoting a book in a book review."

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Image:

Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9…

CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/iho…