HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Alleged Gaggle Surveillance Alert Reportedly Leads to Arrest and Detention of 13-Year-Old Student in Fairview, Tennessee

August 15, 2023

Sometime in August 2023, a 13-year-old student at Fairview Middle School in Tennessee was reportedly arrested, strip-searched, and detained overnight after Gaggle's purported AI-powered surveillance system flagged a private online message as a threat. The student's comment, reportedly a joke in context, was sent to law enforcement under a state zero-tolerance law. The incident reportedly resulted in house arrest, alternative school placement, and a lawsuit alleging wrongful arrest.
Alleged deployer
williamson-county-schools, fairview-middle-school-tennessee
Alleged developer
gaggle
Alleged harmed parties
unnamed-13-year-old-student-from-fairview-tennessee

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1167

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.