AI Bathroom Monitors? Welcome to America's New Surveillance High Schools

Existing Surveillance Tech & Scope

• Commenters link to talks showing “bathroom smoke detectors” that detect vaping and record audio, already deployed in schools, apartments, hospitals, and care facilities.
• Some note that even forests are saturated with trail cameras, illustrating how ubiquitous and hard-to-detect surveillance has become.
• Boy Scouts’ abuse-prevention training explicitly bans cameras and digital recording devices in bathrooms, highlighting that such spaces are widely understood as requiring special privacy.

Privacy, Legality & Normalization

• Several argue bathroom monitoring and audio capture should be illegal wiretapping and a gross privacy violation.
• Others respond that laws are meaningless unless landlords or administrators actually go to jail; otherwise it’s just a business cost.
• Multiple commenters say students are treated like cattle or criminals, and that exposing kids to constant monitoring is a way to normalize surveillance so they accept it as adults.
• Counterpoint: some claim kids have already abandoned privacy themselves through phones and social media; others rebut that children never had meaningful privacy to begin with, so they can’t “choose” to value it.
• Older anecdotes about stall doors removed from school bathrooms (to fight drugs) are used to show long-standing disregard for student dignity.

Effectiveness, False Positives & Vendor Narratives

• The claim that AI systems spot “multiple threats per day” at a single school is widely doubted; commenters suspect this mostly means minor rule-breaking (vaping, skipping class), not gun threats.
• The article’s juxtaposition of daily “threat” detections with national gun-death statistics is criticized as manipulative marketing for surveillance vendors.
• People note the company admits it has no example of a school shooting where its tech was deployed, suggesting an enormous false positive rate if “threats” are interpreted as serious violence.
• Some describe transparent-bag rules and similar measures as “security theater” addressing fear and perception more than actual risk.

Guns, Violence & Policy Dispute

• A large subthread debates whether US school violence is primarily a gun-availability problem, a cultural problem, mental illness, or some mix.
• Some advocate stricter gun control or stigmatizing gun “fandom”; others insist guns are tools, prohibition doesn’t work, and focus should be on criminals and systemic failures.
• There is disagreement over the role of mental illness: some see it as overused and stigmatizing; others argue certain diagnoses combined with substance abuse can increase violence risk.

Lived Experience, Fear & Tradeoffs

• Non-US readers express shock, saying US logic of turning schools into semi-prisons feels alien compared to their experience.
• Some Americans echo this; others describe schools with recurring shootings, stabbings, lockdowns, and bag policies, especially even in affluent districts.
• At least one parent in such a district says these incidents pushed them from neutrality to supporting surveillance, arguing that preventing even one killing outweighs concerns about distrust.
• Others see this as capitulation to a “constant state of fear and paranoia” that profits surveillance firms while avoiding harder political solutions like gun reform or social investment.

Broader Concerns & Resistance

• Several comments frame the trend as emblematic of a wider 21st‑century shift from Enlightenment ideals to fear and distrust.
• Some call for redirecting money into counseling and mental health rather than AI monitoring.
• A few pessimistically suggest that rolling back such systems would likely require major political or governmental upheaval, not mere policy tweaking.