u/Organised_chaotic

I teach into social work. I had a class the other day whereby I got them to watch a 15 minute doco on someone talking about their life story which included substance misuse, homelessness, DFV etc. It is a really raw and powerful story. I then asked my students to use a psychosocial assessment tool I designed to 'assess' this client. I am really wanting to get more into the practical side of SW this trimester with my course and thought this would be a good opportunity for some 'hands-on' experience. Plus, past students were screaming to do more practical social workey things like this.

So, I asked them all to email me their completed assessments afterwards for my feedback. Anyhoo, most of them have used AI - they have fed the transcript from the video into AI and voila - pretty much perfect assessments and many of them exactly the same for all 9 domains. These are future SWs. It made me think that actually this is probably what will be happening with the use of AI in future practice - in fact, you don't even need a SW then - you just need a warm body to click 'Record' and then cut and paste the clients transcript into AI for the assessment. I think this realisation made me kind of sad and to start getting prepared to hang up my work shoes.

I went to Spotlight the other day and watched a couple walking around the store shopping for stuff. He had his phone on with some sitcom running and speaker on full blast that he was watching as he walked around. She was holding his other hand and picking stuff off shelves and also had something running on her phone, with the speaker on that she looked at intermittently. They were about early 30s.

Then, I saw similar again at Woolies yesterday. A woman walking around talking on her phone with the speaker on as she shopped.

I don't know if it irritated me with the noise, or scared me that are we that reliant on being continually attached to a screen that we can't do everyday activities without having it in front of our faces? What do you think?.....

This is my creepy experience. It was early 2000s and I was living with my very young son in a rental property. My sons father would come and stay randomly. He wasn't a good guy and I got rid of him during my time at this house. However, my ex would tell me sometimes, when we woke up, that I was giggling in my sleep and laughing out loud. I started to take notice and before I woke up once in the middle of the night, I actually felt 'fingers' pushing into my ribs but this feeling quickly left as I woke up. I am super ticklish, especially around my ribs. I was also sleeping alone that night....

Not long after I broke up with my ex, one night my little boy was on the front verandah getting his shoes to bring inside to be ready to get dressed for kindy the next day. As he was standing on the front verandah, I started walking down the hallway towards him at the front door, and the front door suddenly slammed. It wasn't windy. There was no wind coming down the hallway. I ran and opened it up and scooped my little boy up and I was so spooked that I grabbed my car keys and we left in a hurry to go stay at my friends house around the corner.

The following night we went home, and I slept with lots of lights on inside. In the middle of that night, I rolled over and opened my eyes and the house was in complete darkness! I jumped up to turn my bedroom light on, and suddenly the other lights in the house came back on. Fast forward to that weekend, and I was having a lunch time nap after working a late shift the night before, and as I was starting to wake up from my nap, I saw a blurry face of an old woman floating in the corner of my bedroom. It was like a photograph in the shape of an oval, with the face of this old woman smiling. Not long after that, I moved out in a hurry!

This memory is something I always think about and I have had several other 'experiences' in my time. But, this one was so vivid and terrifying for me and I always wonder if this 'ghost nanna' wanted me out of her her house, or something else...what do you think? :)

The doomerism about people who used the 5% is getting really boring. I used it 6 months ago, I now have a house on a good size block of land. My kids have their own bedroom. we have chooks now and can get a doggo. Anyone who wants somewhere to call home and not have to endlessly worry about a lease being renewed (or not), ridiculous rent increases, not being able to make the house and garden the way they like it, or rent out rooms without getting permission, should do it.

There are other benefits as well - please add below :) oh, and yes, I have heard all about the negative equity, buying at the top of the market, interest rate increases etc. But, I have my own home that no one can take from me - even if I lost my job - I can get creative and rent out the rooms or any other number of possibilities. Please stop trying to scare us or make out we made the worst decision of our lives. Buy a house if that is your plan and use a scheme if you need to. Sorry for the rant!

I have just been pondering this question, after marking AI slop for the past week. This is a final year course in social work and they had to write about ethical practice (no, the irony is not lost on me lol). One paper, out of 50, was 'real' (I think). The rest made all the bland statements, using lots of terminology, and no concrete examples from their field placements.

I am also not even sure of the purpose of field placement anymore as no real learning is happening as most field placement assessments are done using AI. Another assessment I marked was listening to 30 students do a presentation on their social work practice frameworks. Most of them read straight from their slides, the slides were all created using AI, and when I stopped and asked them questions about concepts they had on their slides, most look terrified and started spouting off lots of terminology or rewording what they had on a slide.

These are students who are about to graduate and know very little. That is horrifying that they are going to go out into the world and work at places like child protection and have no idea about what they are doing.

So, that made me curious if the data is in yet in terms of how many of them actually get a job using their 'degrees'. Why bother paying all that money/go into debt for a degree that is useless if you don't know what any of this shit means? What is the point? What are these students thinking will happen when they know jack shit and can't ask AI questions when they are physically in a job interview?

I am not sure of the how much relevance there is to this little bit of research. I thought it was interesting to know more about digital surveillance and also any links to Epstein. So, I went down the rabbit hole of Cellebrite which is the forensic software that was used by the U.S. government to access locked Apple devices seized from Jeffrey Epstein and to extract and view thousands of deleted images and videos from those devices. The extracted evidence was subsequently processed into datasets shared during legal discovery. (Google search)

Cellebrite is Cellebrite DI Ltd. is a digital forensics company headquartered in Petah Tikva, Israel that provides tools for law enforcement agencies as well as enterprise companies and service providers to collect, review, analyse and manage digital data. Their flagship product series is the Cellebrite UFED.

Cellebrite's largest shareholder is Sun Corporation, which is based in Nagoya, Japan. Cellebrite has fourteen offices around the world including business centres in Washington DC, Munich and in Singapore. In 2021, the Cellebrite company was valued at approximately $2.4 billion. ^((Wikipedia))

These are the founders of the company - Avi Yablonka, Yaron Baratz and Yuval Aflalo. I couldn’t find much about them on the web, nothing about any Epstein links. But, they are very, very clean on the internet. I can’ even find their net worths.

So, Cellebrite, as pointed out by another reddit user here, also was given the contract for NCMEC. This was in 2017. In 2025, Cellebrite integrated NCMECs Cyber Tipline Database of known CSA material directly into its Cellebrite software. This allows investigators to instantly identify known CSA material rather than sorting through them manually – saving them lotttttts of time searching.

https://cellebrite.com/en/resources/whitepapers/cellebrite-strengthens-fight-to-save-exploited-children/

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^(Interestingly, Cellebrite has been accused of HRs violations - Accessnow is an organisation that claims to defend and extend the digital rights of people and communities at risk globally. In 2021, they posted on their page:)

^(")Investors beware: Cellebrite’s human rights compliance system is poorly designed and implemented

Cellebrite’s involvement in human rights violations perpetrated by governments across the globe is especially concerning given Signal’s recent discovery of a major vulnerability in Cellebrite’s software that allows anyone to execute arbitrary code to modify the reports the software produces. While Cellebrite reportedly fixed this flaw, the incident exposed the risk of malicious actors tampering with evidence extracted for court cases, putting defendants’ rights in jeopardy.

Government surveillance has profound implications for individuals’ right to privacy and also produces a chilling effect on the ability to exercise other rights. Under international human rights law, such surveillance should never be used to target journalists, human rights activists, government critics, or minorities.

Cellebrite has to be aware of the systematic human rights violations of its customers, as the company has the responsibility to carry out due diligence on its government clients and their misuse of technology. Once it is aware of a client’s human rights record, Cellebrite must take steps to prevent or mitigate its own contribution to the human rights abuses involving its products and services." (Accessnow website)

Accessnow claimed in 2021 that Cellebrite still had not taken meaningful steps toward complying with these principles, despite claiming to do so in its various published statements.

Upon further looking, this year Cellebrite still had not stopped selling its technology globally, but had apparently taken some actions to halt product use in certain countries following evidence of human rights abuses. "As of early 2026, the company continues to face allegations regarding the misuse of its tools by various governments to target activists and journalists." (Business and Human Rights Centre).

These are the most recent restrictions and suspensions by Cellebrite -

• Serbia (February 2025): Cellebrite suspended the use of its products for "relevant customers" in Serbia after an an Amnesty International report revealed the equipment was used to unlawfully target civil society activists and independent journalists.
• Russia & Belarus (2021-2022): The company previously halted operations and ceased sales in these regions due to concerns over their use against anti-government activists.
• China & Hong Kong (2020): Cellebrite stopped sales in China and Hong Kong following international pressure regarding crackdowns on dissent.

Despite the company's Ethics policies, investigations have linked its technology to potential rights violations in other regions (BHRC, Amnesty International) -

• Jordan (January 2026): Reports from Citizen Lab indicate that Jordanian authorities likely used Cellebrite to extract data from the phones of detained activists and political dissidents. https://citizenlab.ca/research/from-protest-to-peril-cellebrite-used-against-jordanian-civil-society/
• Kenya (February 2026): Allegations surfaced regarding the use of Cellebrite's forensic tools to target a Kenyan activist and political candidate; as of late February 2026, the company had not responded to these specific claims.
• Latin America: Civil society organizations have raised ongoing questions about the sale of surveillance technology and its impact on human rights in the region.

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And I can't/don't want to go any further as this thingy popped up on my computer. A 'computer says No' moment...I have never seen this before and a bit weirded out. Anyway, share your thoughts or if anything here makes you think of something else :) Have a beautiful day!

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