At Harvard, surveillance cameras were secretly installed in the classrooms to keep a record of student attendance.

Teachers and students of even the most authoritative and famous educational institutions can not be insured against unpleasant surprises. At Harvard, surveillance cameras were recently installed in classrooms in order to keep a record of student attendance. At the same time, the students themselves were not told anything, the students received information only this week (the program received a start in the spring).

The goal of the entire project is to study the possibility of monitoring attendance, by obtaining an image of the audience where classes are held, with a frequency of one minute. Of course, the photos were analyzed not by hand, but by specialized software training. After analysis, the images were deleted from the drive.
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As far as can be understood, the project itself did not set out to establish observation of individual students (and, moreover, teachers). The authors of the project wanted to estimate the total attendance, in percentage terms. But, as mentioned above, neither the students nor the teachers were notified of the start of such a monitoring system.

The project itself is, in principle, harmless, if you do not take into account the moment of the “Big Brother”. After the program became known, and many students and teachers began to condemn the leadership of the university, additional information was disclosed. It turns out that the approval of the program was given at the federal level by the Harvard official supervisory board.

Anyway, similar projects can quite work right now and in other educational institutions. Or maybe a valuable idea will be picked up with creative refinement. Who knows, maybe right now someone is already developing a system of automatic face recognition for such a system in other educational (and not only) institutions? On the other hand, there is no shortage of face recognition systems now - Facebook, policemen of various countries, some corporations, work with them for personal purposes. So they can be applied anywhere.

Via theverge