Er wurde verklagt, weil er öffentliche YouTube-Videos geteilt hatte; Albtraum endete mit der Einigung | Bibliothekar verspricht, invasive Bildungstechnologie zu stoppen, nachdem er den Rechtsstreit mit Proctorio beendet hat

Some highlights from this piece:

>Linkletter’s legal nightmare started in 2020 after an education technology company, Proctorio, began monitoring student backlash on Reddit over its AI tool used to remotely scan rooms, identify students, and prevent cheating on exams. On Reddit, students echoed serious concerns raised by researchers, warning of privacy issues, racist and sexist biases, and barriers to students with disabilities.
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>At that time, Linkletter was a learning technology specialist at the University of British Columbia. He had been aware of Proctorio as a tool that some professors used, but he ultimately joined UBC students criticizing Proctorio, as, practically overnight, it became a default tool that every teacher relied on during the early stages of the pandemic.
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>To Linkletter, the AI tool not only seemed flawed, but it also seemingly made students more anxious about exams. However, he didn’t post any tweets criticizing the tech—until he grew particularly disturbed to see Proctorio’s CEO, Mike Olsen, “showing up in the comments” on Reddit to fire back at one of his university’s loudest student critics. Defending Proctorio, Olsen roused even more backlash by posting the student’s private chat logs publicly to prove the student “lied” about a support interaction, The Guardian reported.
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>“If you’re gonna lie bro … don’t do it when the company clearly has an entire transcript of your conversation,” Olsen wrote, later apologizing for the now-deleted post.
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>“That set me off, and I was just like, this is completely unacceptable for a CEO to be going after our students like this,” Linkletter told Ars.
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>The more that Linkletter researched Proctorio, the more concerned he became. Taking to then-Twitter, he posted a series of seven tweets over a couple days that linked to YouTube videos that Proctorio hosted in its help center. He felt the videos—which showed how Proctorio flagged certain behaviors, tracked “abnormal” eye and head movements, and scanned rooms—helped demonstrate why students were so upset. And while he had fewer than 1,000 followers, he hoped that the influential higher education administrators who followed him would see his posts and consider dropping the tech.
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>Rather than request Linkletter remove the tweets—which was the company’s standard practice—Proctorio moved quickly to delete the videos. Proctorio supposedly expected that the removals would put Linkletter on notice to stop tweeting out help center videos. Instead, Linkletter posted a screenshot of the help center showing all the disabled videos, while suggesting that Proctorio seemed so invested in secrecy that it was willing to gut its own support resources to censor criticism of their tools.
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>Together, the videos, the help center screenshot, and another screenshot showing course material describing how Proctorio works were enough for Proctorio to take Linkletter to court.
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>The ed tech company promptly filed a lawsuit and obtained a temporary injunction by spuriously claiming that Linkletter shared private YouTube videos containing confidential information. Because the YouTube videos—which were public but “unlisted” when Linkletter shared them—had been removed, Linkletter did not have to delete the seven tweets that initially caught Proctorio’s attention, but the injunction required that he remove two tweets, including the screenshots.
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>“After years of successful litigation, we are pleased that this settlement (which did not include any monetary compensation) protects our interests by making our initial restraining order permanent,” Rockmael said. “Most importantly, we are glad to close this chapter and focus our efforts on helping teachers and educational institutions deliver valuable and secure assessments.”
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>Responding to Rockmael, Linkletter clarified that the settlement upholds a modified injunction, noting that Proctorio’s initial injunction was significantly narrowed after a court ruled it overly broad. Linkletter also pointed to testimony from Proctorio’s former head of marketing, John Devoy, whose affidavit “mistakenly” swearing that Linkletter was sharing private YouTube videos was the sole basis for the court approving the injunction. That testimony, Linkletter told Ars, suggested that Proctorio knew that the librarian had shared videos the company had accidentally made public and used it as “some sort of excuse to pull the trigger” on a lawsuit after Linkletter commented on the sub-Reddit incident.
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>“Even a child understands how YouTube works, so how are we supposed to trust a surveillance company that doesn’t?” Linkletter wrote in his blog.
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>Grilled by Linkletter’s lawyer, Devoy insisted that he was not “lying” when he claimed the videos Linkletter shared came from a private channel. Instead—even though he knew the difference between a private and public channel—Devoy claimed that he made a simple mistake, even suggesting that the inaccurate claim was a “typo.”
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>Linkletter maintains that Proctorio’s lawsuit had nothing to do with the videos he shared—which his legal team discovered had been shared publicly by many parties, including UBC, none of which Proctorio decided to sue. Instead, he felt targeted to silence his criticism of the company, and he successfully fought to keep Proctorio from accessing his private communications, which seemed to be a fishing expedition to find other critics to monitor.
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>“In my opinion, and this is just my opinion, one of the purposes of the lawsuit was to have a chilling effect on public discourse around proctoring,” Linkletter told Ars. “And it worked. I mean, a lot of people were scared to use the word Proctorio, especially in writing.”
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>Joe Mullin, a senior policy analyst who monitored Linkletter’s case for the nonprofit digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed that Proctorio’s lawsuit risked chilling speech.
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>“We’re glad to see this lawsuit finally resolved in a way that protects Ian Linkletter’s freedom to speak out,” Mullin told Ars, noting that Linkletter “raised serious concerns about proctoring software at a time when students were subjected to unprecedented monitoring.”
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>Linkletter suspected that he and Johnson were added to a “list” of critics that Proctorio closely monitored online, but Proctorio has denied that such a list exists. Holland pushed back, though, telling Ars that Proctorio has “an incredibly long history of fudging the truth in the interest of profit.”
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>“We’re no strangers to Proctorio’s shady practices when it comes to oppressing dissent or criticism of their technologies,” Holland said. “I am utterly not shocked that they would employ tactics that appear to be doing the same thing when it comes to Ian Linkletter’s case.”
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>Regardless of Proctorio’s tactics for brand management, it seems clear that public criticism has impacted Proctorio’s sales, though. In 2021, Vice reported that student backlash led some schools to quickly abandon the software. UBC dropped Proctorio in 2021, too, citing “ethical concerns.”
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>“I was and am gravely concerned about Proctorio’s lack of transparency about how its algorithms work, and how it labels student behaviours as ‘suspicious,’” Linkletter swore in the filing. One of his deleted tweets urged that all schools have to demand transparency and ask why Proctorio was “hiding” information about how the software worked. But in the end, Linkletter saw no point in continuing to argue over whether two deleted tweets re-posting Proctorio’s videos using YouTube’s sharing tool violated Proctorio’s copyrights.

Good on this individual to stand up to this kind of corporate bullying. It’s also continually disappointing to see companies who should know better try to silence people who are speaking up on publicly available information.

The fact that the CEO came to reddit to argue with comments and posted someone’s private support chat logs tells you everything you need to know. Hey Mike, if you’re reading this, below me.

As a student, I can share that many of these so called ‘Proctors’ have some concerning ish buried in their ToS and privacy policies that almost nobody reads. This is on top of the already burdensome, anxiety-inducing and questionable anti-privacy ‘steps’ they make a person go through prior to even beginning an exam.

The fact that an org AND outsourced employees(?) in another country are watching and recording you + have access to the device you’re using the entire time is just another layer of BS that can only be experienced for one’s self and ‘Educational Institutions’ seemingly just dgaf ime/imo.

They are also not the first (nor last) proctor to be sued over their BS and/or inclusion of AI.

If I were a university admin, I would never adopt software from an ed tech company that behaved like this. They are a massive litigation risk. Not only sharing students‘ private information, but also suing employees. What a mess. I hope Proctorio gets buried after this.