A school district spends $180,000 (hyperbole, I don’t know actual numbers) of taxpayer money deploying this system between the actual hardware costs, maintenance costs to install the hardware, it costs to implement it into their network, and probably an ongoing contact with this dummy’s company. Maybe only for support but with the way things are now I’m sure they built this app to phone home to their servers (introducing a huge potential security risk over simply running it locally on the schools existing network infrastructure in a docker or something), calling it “cloud based”, and charging the district 1k/month to run the devices the district now owns and should be able to operate without the company. The company then talks about how they’ll back up records and safeguard data so you don’t have to worry about that (that it dept you pay is pointless!)

Three months after deployment it turns out the sensors can be tripped by many things not related to vaping, maybe increases in heat, mouthwash breath, etc. the false positives are due to a hardware flaw and cannot be fixed with a patch. Feel free to upgrade to sensor version 2.0, now with improved accuracy! (read: the problem still exists but isn’t as bad). Only another 40k to buy the new hardware, rip out the old hardware (which is now worthless), install the new stuff, and configure the software for everything (again, maintenance and IT costs)

9 months after deployment the company is doing poorly because their product is stupid and only a few idiots actually bought it (way to go idiot). There’s concerns because they sent a new Eula that outlines data sharing policies. They are potentially finding ways to harvest the data they agreed to safely store to try and create a new revenue stream to right their sinking ship. District counsel says fighting the Eula change will be expensive and there’s not much precedent for it, plus they state they will anonymize data before sharing so it’s not a ferpa violation, technically. It feels scummy but you can’t do anything about it. You also don’t really trust them to only sell anonymized data but you can’t prove they aren’t crossing that line so whatever, I guess

15 months after deployment they get hacked because they’ve run out of vc cash, never could get an actual profit stream going (turns out they’re spending 750,000/yr on salaries for 5 people and they’re all kitted out with sick work computers for what is basically coding a web app, but I digress). security of their servers was one of the budgetary constraints they chose to make to right the ship (but had to keep the $1800 office chairs and the 15-20k/mo rent loft they use as an office in a hcol area). The contract says this may happen and they’re not responsible unless there’s gross negligence on their part, which you can’t prove, and that they do some bare minimum reactionary shit after the fact to mitigate damage. So they’re legally blameless and now you get to notify your community their children’s data was leaked to god knows who, whoops

22 months after the fact they go out of business officially. You get a form email about the company’s journey and the difficult decision they had to make to stop fucking around on a dumb project that sucks because no dumbass vc will give them fun bucks anymore to keep playing tech bro billionaire. All the sensors stop working because they require a connection to the servers, which they shut off immediately without a sunset period. You’re reminded every day when you log in to the schools admin panel and get 350 “sensor not connected” error messages and your students bitch about the “sensor not connected: server not available” error pop up showing up on their classroom console. It takes IT a few days to remove their shit from the network and that costs you even more money in wasting your IT staff time when they should be fixing the broken computers in the computer lab or whatever.

Now your school has a bunch of weird boxes on the wall. Sometimes people ask you about them and you go “oh those don’t do anything” and remember that they cost taxpayers in your community tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars and wasted hundreds of hours of your supports staffs time that they could’ve been using to improve the school

But then you scroll on instagram and see there’s this new thing that will detect when kids are bullying each other. You just have to put a camera in each classroom. It’s okay, it won’t record. It will just use the power of AI and machine learning. You’re sold right there and the cycle starts again

At least there are some criticisms. Considering it's LinkedIn, forever, it will get drowned by a sea of synergy pivoting lunatics.

In my high school they managed to rip the alarm's siren off the wall without triggering it; if these kids have even an 1/8 th of the ingenuity they had, these things aren't gonna last

The dildo of an unintended consequences is approaching.

Bullies will start blowing vape smoke on other kid's desks to get them in trouble. And someone will eventual create a smoke-box class room to get the screen to light up with alerts.

Then what? You need to cross reference the alerts with a video feed or snapshots.

Then some genius will figure that using AI to analyze all of the data is easier than manually doing so.

Kids will vape at the sensors just to see them on the TV

Unless there will be disciplinary follow-up ( -> no reason for this design), I only see this going the way of de-facto scoreboards among kids.

Tech Bros make a panopticon and call it a novel approach

Kids are gonna find ways to vape. It's just the way it is. Just like when I was a kid we all found ways to smoke. Making it more difficult just gives them more drive to "get away with it." Sometimes I feel like all these preventative measures that people come up with were by people that were never even a kid. Like banning fruity flavors. I started smoking when I was 14 and it wasn't because it tasted good.

Imagine paying taxes for education and they spend it on shit like this.

Of all problems US schools are dealing with, surely vaping is the one that requires the most urgent action.

Look honestly I don't think this is that dystopian.

Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I'm willing to there aren't vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don't give a fuck.

Good God I hate linkedin types. Imagine thinking writing an app that literally just displays a single notification is worthy of making a whole post about. They basically wrote a Hello World app for Android TV. And I'm sure they got paid like 40k by some poor school district to do so.

Its easy enough to make a tube to blow through that should remove enough particulates to bypass the sensor. The kids would never figure this out though. /s

I have a better solution: Run these videos on the screens in the hallways 24/7 to outcringe the vapers.

Someone is going to smash the sensor day 1.

Bubble gum stuck into the sensor coming in 5 seconds...

Quite an expensive toy for the children. Because the boys will play around with it.

As it was with standardized testing, so shall it be with personal behavior: the goal is not to inform the student why, but to enforce compliance.

Introducing!

The Narc App!

Sure to be a hit. Hit with the closest blunt object.

Wait till this crowd hears about smoke detectors.

SIMlink 4G

Are these sensors connected to a cell network? What the hell? More than half my life ago, when I was in high school, we had wifi...

How long before the students gamify it to see who can generate the most alerts?

I am all for vape detectors. They only detect the fumes and aren't really that invasive. They are basiclly specialized fire alarms.

Nicotine is very bad for developing brains. I don't understand why you are ok with minors using it in a public school of all things.

I’m in tech and could never take myself seriously ever again if I built this.

Just make it look uncool! Cigarettes' image went from "cool" to "I'm 12 and I want to be taken seriously by mom/oh my god why did I even tried it". From "hip" vaping, where should it's image go? (Besides down the drain)

Schools are more like prisons nowadays

Sure it seems draconian, but how else are we going to get the kids to stop vaping and start smoking cigarettes like we did when we were in high school?

Won't someone please think of Phillip Morris' profit margins?

Kids figure out how to provide false positives in 3... 2... 1...

How is this invading someone's privacy? All it's doing is detecting if children are smoking in a room or space at school and then putting an alert up about the detection on a screen.

They have zero right to privately smoke at school, or anywhere for that matter, smoking is illegal for children and not something to be taken lightly.

Similarly, adults have no right to privately smoke whilst in the workplace in the bathroom or other non-smoking designated areas. This is also illegal and not to be taken lightly.