Wow. A lot of K-12 students probably don't even know their own SSN off the top of their head, much less understand the impact of having it stored in this way. I can't fathom why it would be necessary for the SSN to be tracked by the school. At most, the school district as a whole might want a record so they could make sure kids are getting schooled but putting that into Canvas doesn't make any sense to me.
Agreed, seems wild to me that anyone in 2026 is using SSN as an identifier in a system that's not doing some kind of tax reporting. It's kryptonite for any other purpose.
Oh, it's insane and I recoiled when she mentioned that.
But it is 100% happening.
People do amazingly stupid things with systems, especially when they don't have enough people with the expertise to set them up properly, so they just throw things in there without stopping to think about whether or not it's a good idea.
I'm guessing that Canvas just sort of lets you put in whatever data you want, and someone evidently decided that putting the student's SSNs in there made sense...
It's not required. I don't know precisely what her district is doing or why - I don't work there But she unprompted brought up that a lot of the minors' PII was in there including SSNs.
It would be nice if system owners stopped thinking "we'll just ask for all the info in case we need it" and instead "we might get sued (or ransomed, or both) because we are collecting this."
- A fair number of LGBTQ people don't feel represented by either party and so wouldn't answer yes to aligning with either the Dems or the Republicans. More communists, anarchists, third-party voters, etc.
- Voters tend older than the general population, and a lot of the LGBTQ elders are either dead or not attached to the community. The biggest demographic in the LGBTQ community by numbers are the bisexuals and a lot of 65 year old bisexuals went through their lives acting and living as straight. Likewise, a lot of older people with gender dysphoria never knew being trans was an option, so they may never have identified with it.
This is the area I wanted to work in before I got sick and ended up being pretty worthless.
I have the following questions, in no particular order - I'm writing this comment off the top of my head in stream of consciousness while procrastinating:
- Why did you decide on a new technical system/platform as the way to go? This might sound like a silly question, but one thing I've noticed when talking to techies who are interested in this problem is that it can veer into 'I have a hammer, look at all these nails!' The reason I ask this is one thing I've noticed in working with the average person (or even very educated non-techy sorts) is that they view themselves as having little to no agency when interacting with technical systems, and I worry that adding another one just further encourages them to outsource that agency (just believing you instead of randos on Instagram/TT). This is versus things like outreach through different channels, formalized educational programs, producing of children's educational material (teach the parents while they read to their kids, for example, which lets them set aside the ego of being lectured to as an adult), traditional/alternative media campaigns, etc. If it's just a case of that's your skill set and resources, fair enough!
- You mentioned in a sister comment the low rates of media literacy. I 100% agree. Do you have/have you found any good ways to handle the combination of high education/socio-economic class and low media literacy? I've noticed very similar patterns across education levels, but my peers with graduate degrees or some manner of social 'success' fully believe themselves to be media literate and in fact some of them could recite most of the deceptive tricks and point them out if asked. They still knee-jerk believe things that confirm their priors.
- Is there any educational focus on heuristics and ways that the average person can satisfice their way to something better than the status quo? A lot of effort in this area seems to assume some platonic ideal of an informed, rational citizen with plenty of time to dedicate to educating themselves/learning better habits. Because of this, they tend to be information dumps. In addition to the low media literacy, there are a lot of people (at least here in America - I can't say for your education system) who lack the requisite knowledge to understand what you're telling them. I know that could sound a little insane, but a lot of people can't manage hypotheticals or understand second-order effects. We've also got the studies about people's attention spans. Going through what amounts to paragraphs of psychological text (or video) presented in a factual way will make people scroll or their eyes glaze over, but actions they can take in their life (e.g. stopping social media use for a month and noticing how their thoughts change, specifically following a small group/topic that you don't belong to/have much interest in to see how conversations change over time without personal investment, etc.) might be more approachable. Right now, the two approaches seem to be 'let experts educate you so you can learn a byzantine system in your 45 minutes a day of free time' and 'just go touch grass/let's go back to 1990'. I don't think either of those are realistic for the average person.
I used to work in academia and am now an LMS admin (in private industry). I've interviewed for LMS admin positions at educational institutions and each time I've ended up walking away. The questions I was asked at the last interview revealed what a ridiculously unplanned, spiraling mess their system was and that I would have no agency over it. No, thanks. And it was clear the reason for this was faculty recalcitrance and an inability to tell them no. Each one wanted a special plugin/special way of doing things, causing a giant mess of insecure bloat, and a fair amount of interview questions always amount to 'how do you wheedle faculty into doing things/placate their egos to keep things running?'
I'm not a rockstar candidate either: I'm a disabled, geographically-constrained, self-taught(ish) sort-of techie. The disability means I have substantial holes in my resume/work history, etc. I don't have a CS degree or any kind of formal IT education. If people at my level of knowledge are looking at these jobs and passing because they're not worth it, I can't imagine the actual pool of people who get hired is great.
LMS admins in particular are going to be harder to find/retain because we tend to have options we can jump to that would be less onerous than doing LMS admin for a dumpster fire. I could go straight IT or full Instructional Design, for example.
In private industry, I can tell people to kick rocks if they want to do something that the system doesn't support/is a really bad idea. And if I can't, I'm not held responsible for the consequences.
LMSes have to balance a lot of directly competing needs.
It has to be simple enough for the average person to use (both on the learner side and the instruction side) and have enough complexity to allow for a lot of flexibility in setup because every organization is slightly different. They have to support 50 million file formats and everything has to be backwards compatible until the end of time and everything has to load properly and quickly on 50 million different device/OS/browser combinations. Yes, there's SCORM as a standard, but even that is rickety, and an LMS that doesn't support non SCORM files is dead in the water anyway.
They're simple(ish) in code, and a nightmare in requirements.
Everything you say is true, and yet it's clear you've never used Canvas.
Canvas is decidedly, not fast, fails to display even trivial files (such as source code) as well as more complex files that should just be handled by the browser (such as video), and it has a non-intuitive, verbose, and tiresome interface that would have felt old-fashioned 20 years ago.
Yes, I should have said 'in theory', because there always ends up being compromise and usually that's the thing that's chucked out first.
LMSes frankly run like shit. I don't work with Canvas right now, but every one I've used has run like shit.
However, there are reasons that the complex files aren't handled by the browser: tracking and persistence. It isn't enough to make a video file watchable, it then needs to be tracked in the same system as every other training/educational material and in the same way. If you don't care whether the students actually watch the video, then yeah, throw them a YouTube link or embed a video on a personal site or just have the LMS serve a basic embed. But being able to track video, make it mandatory, make it so that it can't be fast forwarded/people can't skip to the end etc. all matter when LMSes are used for topics that are required for compliance and regulatory purposes.
I don't disagree on the interface(s). Ours is a farce and I hate it.
It's likely that they're so bad precisely because of the simple tech and complex requirements. Simple tech doesn't mean 'easy' or 'not time consuming'. But it means you're looking for developers who have a decent level of technical proficiency (to handle the numerous edge cases and flexibility the systems demand: it's not hard but things like the data structures need to be well thought out and every single piece of the system is integrated with one another in most LMSes so you can't silo work as easily) and who want to work on problems that aren't hard and require dealing with a lot of unreasonable people (in the form of their requirements). You have to allow/design for a lot of stupid things because otherwise people will throw tantrums about it.
Then on top of that, you're developing something that doesn't directly generate profit, so nobody is going to pay for it or appreciate the work you put in.
Then on top of THAT, they're fairly insulated from the actual end users.
If you're truly fortunate, you can end up with an expensive chronic but not deadly condition that penalizes you for saving and having assets. Your healthcare isn't an emergency, so if it isn't paid for, you don't get it. But if you have any money, no Medicaid for you. Instead, you get to drain your accounts until you're impoverished and then they'll help you.
That reminds me of the roads in my city. They're disgusting.
The reason is because the city charter mandates they have to take the cheapest bid. Of course the quality is crap and none of the fixes last! Fortunately, we just changed that, so hopefully it will get better.
If you'll allow me the grace to explain, I think the issue is more complicated than it seems at first glance.
Procurement policy in USA is usually "lowest responsible bid", meaning you can reasonably expect that the contractor can complete the work without going bankrupt.
With respect to the work itself, a competent civil engineer will provide for appropriate materials and handling to ensure the contractors are supplying a substantially similar product. Most repaving jobs in the city go no further than resurfacing - remove the top 1-2 inches and install 1.5 - 2.5 inches new.
This treats the symptoms, not the problem!
I'm assuming you're in a wet climate. The problem is the subbase is reflecting strain through the road surface, initiating cracks which are openned further by weather. To noticeably improve, you'd have to remove the subbase to great depth and replace with engineered fill, multiple layers of geotextile, storm drainage improvements, then a full depth asphalt section. Not only are the materials for this work expensive, but it represents a different order of magnitude of labor, the number 1 cost driver. Sometimes the tax base is so weakened that the city cannot even keep up with resurfacing and you end up with roads like you describe.
The economics on this are difficult to assess because everyone knows the roads are forcing more car repairs and accidents, and generally rob you of bliss... but the calculus to improve the roads via property taxes is not straight forward, i.e. it's political.
In my particular case, I'm comfortable saying it's the charter only because I've lived in poorer municipalities with way worse tax bases in the same weather/climate and the roads were better - comparing municipal roads to municipal roads - and I've heard the council members talking about it.
But I didn't know that about the sublease layers in particular and the greater cost (and I assume time in addition to labor and materials, which would in turn require the road to be closed for longer and increase use of other roads + cause angry constituents). Now I do! Thanks! Also explains why our higher truck weight limit fucks the state's roads so much: I'd known that but not the reason specifically.
This is why I don't budget. I'm not immensely financially irresponsible: I make maybe 1/3 to 1/5 what the average person on HN makes (~50k), but I still contribute to my 401k enough to get my match, I could fairly easily tank about a 10k expense/probably live for 3-6 months on the money I have set aside with adjustments.
But whenever I've tried to budget, I run into the same problem anorexics do with counting calories. I will literally hurt myself in order to see the savings number go up. I can live on $10/week for food. All it will cost is my health. I can be in pain for 8+ months out of the year (MS muscle spasticity + heat intolerance ) so I don't use my heat or A/C because those cost money. Etc. I will literally berate myself to the point of a panic attack over buying a $25 book from an author I've loved for decades, believing it makes me a horrible human being to be so 'frivolous'.
Yikes.
reply