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Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School. (www.gadgetreview.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.

No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.

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[–] 154 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Now that you know everything on Snapchat is going through active automated filtering, consider what Snapchat has chosen NOT to flag and is allowing to flow freely, like sex trafficking and the sale of minors.

As unfair and life-changing as this event has been for this young teacher, I think the actual story of what Snapchat (and every other digital communication method) is reading/tracking yet allowing is a much, much bigger story. And dirtier. With billionaires and pedophiles and all manner of nasty allowables we do not yet know.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago*

    This will ve the biggest shock to society when people discover what has been known. The only reason people are not blackmailed into compliance and slavery yet is because they have not destabilized the gov enough to get away with it.

    Think if they had to explain how they know the color of your shit that day, but they can't explain where all the cocaine came from or why sex trafficking rings still exist? How did they know everything else but not how that senator bought the crack he was caught smoking?

    We can't be more than a few years away if we continue along this path.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago*

    I suspect a lot of the influence of Israel and the US on European politicians who again and again act against the European Public Opinon and in favor of Israel and the US, is the ton of blackmail material those two states have gathered on politicians the world over in the modern era of digital communications mainly via American systems, using portable networked pocket computers running OSes from American companies and which have everything needed to be a fully-features surveillance device, including a camera.

    Every single vaguelly criminal or even just shameful action of any European politician with a chance of reaching a position of power, done via or around a smartphone or computer running an American OS and/or using American chat software, is almost certainly stored in a database somewhere.

    Certainly that would explain A LOT of what's going on in European Politics, especially when it comes to Israel turning full-on NAZI whilst European governments mainly just make believe nothing is happening or propose purely symbolic performative measures with zero effectiveness in stopping the Genocide.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    That's a great point. If they aren't scanning for things, they likely wouldn't be held responsible, but if they are scanning things, now they are the arbiters of what gets passed on or not.

    ChatGPT had an issue where someone got flagged for being a risk, they assessed it in person and decided not to action it, and then something happened. They're being sued and the Canadian government is getting involved.

    What has snapchat now actively decided not to action, where something bad happens, now that we know they read everything?

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